Advancement to Candidacy Presentation: “Efficiency Gains from Coordinating Carbon Sequestration Incentives”, Roberto Amaral Santos

Speaker

Roberto Amaral Santos, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biography

Roberto Amaral Santos is a PhD student in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on environmental and agricultural economics. In particular, his work focuses on the intersection of conservation and agricultural policies, on pollination economics, and on the formation and transmission of environmental preferences and values.

Roberto has experience with both reduced and structural form estimation. He enjoys thinking out-of-the-box for identification strategies and employing new econometric techniques in his research. Although mainly an empirical researcher, he is very excited about theoretical research and how it informs great empirical work.

Roberto holds a Bachelor and a Master degree in Economics from São Paulo School of Economics - Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Brazil. He previously worked in asset management and insurance brokerage. During his graduate studies, he gained teaching experience as an instructor for Statistics for Economists (undergraduate level), as well as a teaching assistant for undergraduate and graduate economics courses. In his free time, he enjoys reading comics, classic cars and several kinds of physical activities.

Event Details

Roberto will be presenting his Advancement to Candidacy paper, “Efficiency Gains from Coordinating Carbon Sequestration Incentives”. To access the Advancement paper, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.

Abstract and JEL Codes

We study the potential efficiency gains from the coordination of incentives for terrestrial carbon sequestration. We estimate a static model of land use for Brazil and simulate the individual and interactive impacts of a deforestation tax, a reforestation subsidy, and incentives for low carbon agricultural practices in terms of carbon sequestration. Our results show the potential for carbon capture by individual implementation of a deforestation tax and incentives for low carbon agricultural practices. However, we observe that joint implementation of all these policies lead to inefficiencies as their effects may cancel one each other.

JEL Codes: Q15, Q18, Q23, Q28, Q58

Event will be available via Zoom.