Conference Agenda

This paper provides causal evidence that NGO campaigns influence land-use decisions in Brazil’s soy and beef supply chains—two of the leading drivers of tropical deforestation globally. Using a shift-share design that exploits quasiexogenous variation in campaign timing and firm–municipality trade linkages, I find that municipalities that trade with firms that are targeted by NGOs significantly reduce deforestation, primarily by deterring forest-to-cattle conversion. Campaigns also promote reallocation from cattle grazing to soy cultivation, indicating a shift toward more intensive and economically productive land uses. These transitions are accompanied by measurable gains in land productivity, suggesting that NGO pressure not only curbs extensive deforestation but also enhances the efficiency of existing agricultural areas. The results underscore the persistent influence of civil society in shaping environmental outcomes, even after formal supply-chain commitments are in place, and highlight the broader potential of reputational governance to complement state regulation in managing global environmental externalities.

This study examines how climate change has reshaped land use allocation across Europe, moving beyond the well-established focus on agriculture to also include forestry, urban, and other land uses. Combining high-resolution satellite data from 1990 to 2018, with grid-level variation in climate normals, we identify how

climate change drives the reallocation of land among these four land uses, exploiting 8km x 8km grid-level first-differences over medium- (6-year) and long-term (28-year) horizons. We find that climate change accounts for roughly one-tenth of all land-use changes observed in Europe since 1990, with marked regional heterogeneity. In the coldest regions, agricultural areas expanded more in the fastest-warming grids, while urban areas increased more in the slowest-warming ones. In contrast, in initially warmer regions, rising temperatures prompted a shift away from agriculture and forestry toward urban and other uses. To shed light on the underlying mechanisms, we estimate a land-use-specific Ricardian model on detailed French land transactions and show that the documented climate-induced land-use changes are consistent with shifts in the relative profitability of competing land uses. Overall, our results emphasize the need to move beyond single-sector analyses to capture the full set of intersectoral land-use adjustments when assessing the impacts of climate change on our economies.

Sanctions for environmental infractions aim to punish perpetrators and deter future offenses. Social networks are important for mediating both objectives, yet are often overlooked by researchers and policymakers who design sanction regimes. With a rich panel dataset of millions of rancher-to-rancher cattle transactions in Brazil, we assessed how rare but costly sanctions for illegal deforestation propagated through transaction networks of ranchers who cleared forest. We found that sanctions did not significantly change ranchers’ network structure, suggesting that ranchers continued to access similar supply chains even after receiving an economic embargo. However, networks were important for deterring deforestation. Controlling for deforestation events in the network, the average rancher reduced forest clearing by 17.3 Ha/year after their network connection was sanctioned, and by 5.7 Ha/year after a connection-of-a-connection was sanctioned. Given the much larger number of connections-of-connections in the network, 84% of total avoided deforestation was on these properties. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for network-related spillovers when designing environmental policies and research. We also provide unique insight into the importance of distant connections for amplifying the total deterrence effects of environmental policies, extending beyond previous studies that measured spillovers only on direct spatial neighbors.

We examine the relationship between agricultural land potential and conflict across Sub-Saharan Africa, where such conflicts are widespread. To address endogeneity, we construct a plausibly exogenous, crop-specific indicator of agricultural potential based on a weather-driven suitability model. The indicator leverages variation in weather and soil conditions to capture changes in crop-growing potential. Using a 0.1° grid-cell dataset covering the period 1997–2023 and conflict data from ACLED, we focus on overall crop and climate suitability for 51 crops grown across Africa. We find that long-term increases in agricultural potential are associated with increases in conflict within countries. By using crop-specific, weather-based suitability measures rather than realized production, we provide new evidence on the climate–agriculture–conflict nexus, with implications for land management and conflict prevention policies.