Dissertation Defense: “Essays on Ecosystem Services, Land Use Policy and Green Attitudes”, Roberto Amaral Santos
Speaker
Roberto Amaral de Castro Prado Santos, PhD Candidate, University of California, Santa Barbara
Biography
Roberto Amaral Santos is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on environmental and agricultural economics. 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’s and a Master’s 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
Join us to hear Roberto’s dissertation defense. He will be presenting his/her dissertation titled, “Essays on Ecosystem Services, Land Use Policy and Green Attitudes“. To access a copy of the dissertation, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.
Abstract
The first chapter studies the economic value of environmental services that temperate forests provide to two major grain crops—corn and soybeans—in the U.S. Midwest. Forests in the United States often border croplands due to land use policies (e.g., conservation initiatives) and landowners’ profit-maximizing decisions. Agroforestry practices and anecdotal evidence indicate that nearby forests may benefit agriculture. While forests provide a range of ecosystem services that can influence crop productivity, the direction and overall magnitude of these effects is theoretically ambiguous and empirically unknown. In this context, forest conservation policies could be an underappreciated yet cost-effective way to bolster agricultural production. By leveraging detailed field-level variation, I estimate corn and soybean yield responses to forest density of 1.25%–3.20% and 0.66%–3.34%, respectively. I use these estimates to calculate an annual value of forest ecosystem services to agriculture between USD 605 million and USD 1.9 billion in 2020. These findings have implications for cost-benefit analyses of conservation policies, the design of programs that place forests adjacent to agricultural lands (e.g., the Conservation Reserve Program), and the scheduling of timber harvests in public forests. They also bear on the political economy of conservation, since—in contrast to diffuse carbon or biodiversity benefits—any effects on yields would accrue to a well-defined, organized, and influential group:
farmers.
In the second chapter, joint with Linus Blomqvist, Laurel Abowd, Jason Jon Benedict, Catharina Latka, Kathy Baylis, Robert Heilmayr and Andrew Plantinga, we study the potential efficiency gains from the coordination of incentives for terrestrial carbon sequestration. In responding to land use drivers of climate change, policymakers frequently rely upon a patchwork of overlapping mitigation policies. In the absence of a single, economy-wide carbon price, these incentives are often introduced as isolated policies, but each individual policy may generate distorting incentives affecting other land uses. Hence, harmonization of these incentives holds the potential to lead to a more efficient allocation of land. 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 indicate substantial carbon capture potential from implementing individually a deforestation tax, a reforestation subsidy, and a low-carbon agricultural subsidy. In contrast, simultaneous implementation of forest and low-carbon agriculture policies generates inefficiencies, as their effects partially offset one another. These inefficiencies are sizable, reducing total sequestration potential by approximately 10% over a 20-year horizon.
In the third chapter, joint with Ravi Vora, we examine if manufacturing plant openings by energy transition firms in the U.S. affect local environmental attitudes, in particular by altering communities’ intrinsic motivation towards the environment. Theoretically, the direction of the effect is ambiguous: such openings could either crowd in or crowd out environmental motivation. If place-based industrial policy has the potential to shift environmental preferences, its motivational impacts should be taken into account in the political economy and design of environmental interventions.
We analyze the arrival of firms producing batteries, electric and hybrid vehicles, and components for wind and solar energy. We identify revealed environmental preferences through costly real-world behavior: voting outcomes and household adoption of solar panels. Identifying the causal effect of plant openings is empirically challenging, as locations that attract such firms differ in both observable and unobservable ways from those that do not. To address this, we use synthetic control methods and, where feasible, compare with areas experiencing openings of non-green manufacturing firms. We find no consistent evidence that the establishment of green manufacturing plants significantly alters community-level environmental motivations and attitudes, although the results are imprecise.
JEL Codes: D12, D72, H23, H41, L69, Q15, Q23, Q28, Q51, Q57, Q58, Q59
