Kathryn Baragwanath

Forests serve a crucial role in our fight against climate change. Secondary forests in the form of forest restoration and reforestation provide important potential for conservation of biodiversity and climate change mitigation. In this paper, we explore whether collective property rights in the form of Indigenous Territories (ITs) lead to higher rates of secondary forest growth on previously deforested areas. We exploit the timing of granting of property rights as well as the geographic boundaries of ITs and two different methods, regression discontinuity design and difference-in-difference to recover causal estimates. We find strong evidence that homologated Indigenous territories not only reduce deforestation inside their lands, but also lead to higher secondary forest growth on previously deforested areas. After homologation, ITs displayed higher secondary forest growth than land outside ITs with an estimated effect of 2\%. Furthermore, the average age of secondary forests was 2.6 years older inside homologated ITs. Together, these findings provide evidence for the role that collective property rights can play in the push to restore forest ecosystems.

In this paper, we draw on common-pool resource theory to argue that indigenous territories, when granted full property rights, will be effective at curbing deforestation. Using a novel dataset, we test the effect of property rights on deforestation between 1982 and 2016. In order to identify causal effects, we combine a regression discontinuity design with the orthogonal timing of homologation. We find that observations inside territories with full property rights show a 66% decrease in deforestation, while the effect does not exist in territories without full property rights. While these are local average treatment effects, our results suggest that not only do indigenous territories serve a human-rights role, but they are a cost-effective way for governments to preserve their forested areas. First, obtaining full property rights is crucial to recognize indigenous peoples original right to land and protect their territories from illegal deforestation. Second, when implemented, indigenous property rights create sustainable areas in the Amazon rainforest, providing an important positive externality for Brazil and the rest of the world in terms of climate change mitigation.

This paper proposes a methodology for defining urban markets based on economic activity detected by satellite imagery. We use nighttime lights data, whose use in economics is increasingly common, to define urban markets based on contiguous pixels that have a minimum threshold of light intensity. The coarseness of the nightlight data and the blooming effect of lights, however, create markets whose boundaries are too expansive and too smooth relative to the visual inspection of actual cities. We compare nightlight-based markets to those formed using high-resolution daytime satellite imagery, whose use in economics is less common, to detect the presence of built-up landcover. We identify an order of magnitude more markets with daytime imagery; these markets are realistically jagged in shape and reveal much more within and across-market variation in the density of economic activity. The size of landcover-based markets displays a sharp sensitivity to the proximity of paved roads that is not present in the case of nightlight-based markets. Our results suggest that daytime satellite imagery is a promising source of data for economists to study the spatial extent and distribution of economic activity.

Oil royalties provide a substantial and volatile inflow of non tax-payer money to municipal coffers, creating dynamic incentives for politicians in office. Resource windfalls change politicians' budget constraints, generate difficulties for voters to distinguish politicians' integrity, and create incentives for corruptible candidates to enter politics, changing the pool of candidates. Using a formal model with moral hazard and adverse selection, I show how resource windfalls generate the strategic entry of worse candidates into politics, which creates cycles in corruption and reelection patterns. In Brazil, where offshore royalties are determined and allocated exogenously, oil inflows create strong opportunities for corruption. I find strong effects of oil windfalls on corruption. On average, a one standard deviation increase in oil royalties produces a 29% increase in corruption. The effects of windfalls on corruption are larger after elections during booms and lower during busts. Furthermore, oil royalties lead to a reelection cycle: when the price of oil is expected to be higher, incumbents are reelected more often than when the price of oil is expected to fall, independent of economic and individual level variables. I show that strategic entry of worse candidates during booms is likely the cause of these corruption and reelection cycles, as predicted by the theory. Taken together, these results point to a strong effect of oil royalties on local level political equilibria.

Women have been shown to have different policy preferences, invest in different types of goods and be less corrupt than men when elected into political office. In this paper, we study the effects of electing a woman mayor into office in the Brazilian Amazon on rates of deforestation. We exploit close election regression discontinuity design in order to establish causal findings. We find that electing a woman mayor leads to significantly lower deforestation rates during the women's time in office. We propose that women's effect on reduced deforestation comes through two mechanisms: (i) women's distinct preferences towards climate change and (ii) a lower likelihood of being captured or corrupt. Although we can't fully differentiate between the mechanisms, we provide evidence that the corruption mechanism is certainly at play. Women mayors are less corrupt than their male counterparts, receive less campaign funding from businesses, and are less likely to receive funding from large agricultural and mining companies. Altogether, our findings strongly support the theory that women's representation reduces deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon, with evidence that lower likelihood of regulatory capture and corruption levels are driving these results, at least in part.

We use a general spatial model to estimate the impact of transportation infrastructure on the spatial distribution of economic activity. We do so limiting ourselves solely to publicly available remotely-sensed satellite data and digitized road maps. Our setting is the expansion of India’s road and highway network during the 2000s. By demonstrating that our approach works in India, where we can validate our results using data from the country’s economic census, we aim to create a framework that is applicable to the many environments where data are even more sparse and (or) where transport networks span national borders.

Improvements in local governance can lead to positive policy spillovers beyond the intended consequences of the initial policy, as local capacity is built within bureaucracies and better enforcement structures are created. In this paper, we analyze the policy spillovers from the Green Municipalities Program in the Brazilian Amazon (PMV). The PMV is a voluntary program implemented in the State of Para, which sought to reduce deforestation and decentralize deforestation monitoring to the local government level. We analyze the effects of PMV on secondary forest growth—an area often overlooked despite its potential for ecological restoration and climate change mitigation. Using a set of quasi-experimental methods from staggered difference in differences to generalized synthetic control methods to account for selection into treatment, we find that the PMV resulted in a notable 9% increment in secondary forest cover, equivalent to a carbon sequestration potential of 11,885 tCO₂/year. The effects were mainly driven by land in medium-sized properties with clarified rights and land regularization. Additionally, and in line with our argument on local capacity building, PMV also curtailed land-related disputes and increased non-agricultural GDP within participating municipalities. Collectively, our results underscore the potential of voluntary governance-intensive programs in achieving broader environmental objectives.

Can land-based conservation measures constrain deforestation during electoral cycles? We focus on the case of forest allocation as a provision of non-programmatic goods during election years. Specifically, we test whether the presence of conservation units can mitigate the effects of electoral pressure on deforestation. Scholars have provided ample evidence for the existence of electoral cycles of deforestation, we propose that the designation of protected areas and Indigenous territories lowers the supply and demand of forests available for exploitation, thereby constraining where politicians can offer forests to voters in exchange for electoral support. We test this theory with national elections at the cross-country level and explore micro-level dynamics within municipal elections in Brazil. We find that the presence of conserved land helps mitigate these electoral cycles and that the degree to which politicians have control over specific protected areas determines the constraining role of conservation units.

Conservation units have been shown to significantly reduce deforestation and are considered an important policy option for the preservation of our forests. However, a conservation unit's ability to reduce deforestation varies with institutional and geographic context. In Brazil, the institutional infrastructure surrounding the national system of conservation units has been aggressively dismantled in recent years. Since 2016, funding for environmental and indigenous agencies has been significantly reduced while enforcement efforts have been greatly diminished. During the current government, key positions which used to be technocratic have been replaced with political actors aligned with Federal government interests. In this context, we analyze whether conservation units are still able to effectively protect the Amazon rainforest, despite the dismantling of institutions around them. We find that the conservation effects of indigenous lands with full property rights and sustainable use areas remain strong, compared both to indigenous lands without full property rights and to strictly protected areas. We attribute these results to whether a conservation unit is governed internally by local inhabitants or externally, by the state.

Satellite data plays a pivotal role in monitoring deforestation and shaping environmental policies. This study re-evaluates the impact of key conservation policies in the Brazilian Amazon—specifically, the Blacklisting of Municipalities (Municípios Prioritários - MP) and the Green Municipality Program (Programa Municípios Verdes - PMV)—utilizing three satellite-based datasets: PRODES, Mapbiomas, and Global Forest Watch (GFW). We employ a robust econometric framework exploiting staggered entry into treatment and generalized synthetic controls to accounts for self-selection into treatment. Our analysis reveals that the government-produced PRODES dataset systematically overestimates policy effects compared to Mapbiomas and GFW. We argue this is in part due to its dual role as both the monitoring tool for enforcement and the source of data for policy assessment. We then investigate the strategic shift in deforestation patterns in response to enhanced enforcement mechanisms, highlighting the influence of dataset selection on policy evaluation. By analyzing over 500GB of data, equivalent to over 180 billion Landsat pixels, we identify significant discrepancies in deforestation behaviors captured by varying resolutions of satellite data. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering strategic adaptations to monitoring and enforcement in policy evaluations as the data used to monitor and enforce is also used to measure outcomes, and underscore the need for high-resolution data to accurately assess the true impacts of deforestation policies on climate change mitigation efforts.