Conference Agenda

This paper examines how farmers adjust crop choices in response to a large and persistent increase in agricultural labor supply. We exploit the inflow of Syrian refugees into Turkey as a natural experiment that generated substantial and spatially heterogeneous variation in labor availability across provinces. Using administrative data on crop areas, production, and prices, combined with a distance-based instrumental variables strategy and a continuous difference-in-differences framework, we identify the causal effect of refugee inflows on agricultural outcomes. We find that greater refugee exposure leads to a gradual reallocation of land from cereals toward more labor-intensive fruits: a one percentage point increase in the refugee share raises the fruit share of total agricultural area by 0.32 percentage points per year. Event-study estimates show that these adjustments emerge around four years after the onset of the refugee inflow. We further document increases in agricultural GDP and production value, with persistently low agricultural wages playing a key role in facilitating this reallocation. These findings underscore the importance of policies that account for medium-run agricultural adjustment when designing refugee integration and agricultural development strategies in host countries.

This paper quantifies the impact of rural–urban migration on agricultural fires, a major source of air pollution in China, by combining satellite remote sensing records with population census data. We leverage an exogenous trade shock that increased manufacturing labor demand in destination prefectures, which drew workers from origin counties through established migration networks. We find that a one percentage point increase in rural labor emigration in a county in 2010 led to a 5% rise in agricultural fires from 2011 to 2017. This effect is driven by reduced agricultural labor, which incentivizes fire use as a labor–saving land–clearing method. Empirical evidence supports this mechanism, showing no significant effects from non–agricultural labor emigration or migration to nearby areas where return farming remains feasible, and the most pronounced impact during peak harvest seasons. Having uncovered this unintended environmental externality of rural–urban migration, we demonstrate that institutional reforms, such as recent land titling programs, mitigate the issue due to their potential to facilitate efficient farmland reallocation and promote large–scale farming during labor outflows, proving more effective than nationwide administrative bans on open-field burning.

We study the consequences of France’s 2018 ban on the use of neonicotinoids —insecticides that are harmful to pollinating insects— on agricultural production. Using data on pesticide use, wildlife population levels and agricultural production we document four keys results: (i) the ban had an immediate and complete effect translating in a sharp drop in purchases and quantification in surface water; (ii) average yields fell by 2% more in departments heavily relying on neonicotinoids; (iii) we associate this modest drop to changing agricultural practices as farmers substituted with other insecticides; (iv) we find the premise of a recovery of pollinators but no differential effect on yields based on the degree of pollination dependence. Our findings inform the value of placing restrictions on agricultural inputs to both production and the preservation of biodiversity.

Unprecedented loss of biodiversity and zoonotic disease outbreaks threaten human and planetary well-being. The consumption of wild meat lies as the intersection of these interrelated risks, yet supply-side interventions in informal markets remain understudied. We provide evidence that voluntary payment contracts to wild meat vendors in the spirit of payments for ecosystem services (PES) can reduce wild meat reliance. Our study combines a baseline survey with 427 informal restaurant owners in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire that informed randomized field experiments involving 56 of those restaurants, with an online survey of 2,131 Europeans across 24 countries who may help fund the contracts via donation calls. All participating restaurant owners received financial training and were randomly assigned to a control group (display wild meat information poster) or a treatment group (poster plus monetary compensation for a four-week ban of wild meat sales). In addition to the 4-weeks intervention phase, we collect data for 2 weeks pre- and post-intervention, and extensive baseline and endline questionnaires for a comprehensive evaluation. Treatment restaurants achieved 98% compliance (verified by mystery shoppers) and reduced wild meat sales to 0.3 dishes per day, collectively avoiding 4 tons of wild meat sales over the study period. Notably, the financial performance of restaurants was stable, even without the compensation payments, by substituting wild meat for other dishes. Moreover, we observe no evidence of spillovers onto control restaurants, and 50% of the treatment effect was sustained two weeks after payments ended. The European donors show substantial willingness to financially support restaurant owners for avoiding wild meat, with 71% of participants sacrificing on average 50% of their resources in donations. Together, these results show that voluntary PES-style incentives may offer a scalable and financially sustainable mechanism to reduce pressure on wildlife and lower zoonotic disease risks from informal urban markets, ultimately improving upon planetary health.