Practice Job Talk: Anna Pede, University of California, Santa Barbara

Speaker

Anna Pede, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biography

Anna Pede is a Ph.D. Candidate in environmental economics studying environmental policy in the tropics, focusing on illegal deforestation, fire, and natural resource extraction. Her research combines causal inference and remotely sensed data to investigate: (1) How do regulated agents respond to environmental monitoring and enforcement, and when do these responses generate unintended consequences? (2) What are the environmental and health costs of illegal land-use change, including fire use and small-scale mining? (3) How do land tenure arrangements and community-level institutions shape the effectiveness of forest conservation policy?

Her job market paper, "Fire and Punishment: Enforcement Incentives and Fire Use in the Brazilian Amazon," is the first to show that imperfect monitoring of illegal deforestation inadvertently pushes illegal deforestation practices towards fire, a clearing technology with multiple additional negative externalities. Her research is supported by a Russell E. Train Education for Nature Fellowship from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Before coming to the Bren School, Anna earned an MSc and BA in Economics from the University of São Paulo, where she studied the land-use impacts of the Amazon Soy Moratorium and held a research fellowship with Instituto Escolhas' Economics and Environment Chair.

Title

"Fire and Punishment: Enforcement incentives and fire use in the Brazilian Amazon"

Abstract

Incomplete monitoring of illegal behavior may cause violators to reoptimize their criminal activities. I study how satellite monitoring of deforestation impacts illegal land-clearing behavior in the Brazilian Amazon. I argue that by detecting
primarily mechanical clearings, the introduction of near-real-time satellite monitoring favored a technological substitution towards the use of fire. Using cloud cover as an instrument for satellite-based detection, I find that municipalities under more intensive surveillance experienced a statistically significant substitution from mechanical to fire-based clearing. My findings help explain why Amazon fires have persisted despite the overall decline in deforestation starting from 2005.

Keywords: Forest fires, deforestation, environmental law enforcement

JEL Classification Codes: Q51, Q57, Q58