Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
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Egg-timer session: (Non-)Renewable resources Location: Auditorium J: Aina Uhde Session Chair: Pedro Henrique Batista de Barros, University of Exeter | |
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Do local institutions impact the environment? Evidence from deforestation in Brazil 1: University of Exeter, United Kingdom; 2: University of Sao Paulo, Brazil The causal impacts of local institutions on tropical deforestation are still little explored in the literature because they involve endogenous mechanisms that act through socioeconomic and political channels that hinder identification. To fill such a gap, this paper explores exogenous geographical and historical variations in current local institutions to estimate their effects on forest cover in Brazil, an ecologically and economically important country. We assume that the initial conditions the country's settlers found led to institutional designs that conditioned its subsequent development, explaining current institutions' differences. Our main results show that the local institutional change has a positive heterogeneous causal effect on deforestation, even after several robustness checks. We also used a Causal Random Forest algorithm to estimate individual treatment effects, which further supported our main results. This empirical evidence demonstrates that public policies that aim to improve local institutional quality must adequately consider the potential side effects of deforestation. | |