Roberto Amaral de Castro Prado Santos

Biography

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar affiliated with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) working with Dr. Hannah Druckenmiller.

I hold a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). I also hold a BA and a MA in Economics from the São Paulo School of Economics - Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo, Brazil.

My primary research interests are Environmental and Agricultural Economics.

I am on the 2026-2027 job market.

Job Market Paper Title

"The Value of Temperate Forest Environmental Services to Agriculture"

Abstract

Forests in the United States often border croplands due to land-use policies and landowners’ profit-maximizing decisions. While forests provide a range of ecosystem services that can influence crop productivity, the direction and overall magnitude of these effects are theoretically ambiguous and empirically unknown. I estimate the economic value of ecosystem services that temperate forests in the U.S. Midwest provide to two major grain crops: corn and soybeans. Leveraging detailed field-level variation and a novel instrument, the extent of federal and state forests surrounding agricultural fields, I find positive yield responses to forest presence. Across specifications, these effects translate into $343 million to $1.88 billion in additional revenue for corn and soybeans in 2020. I find evidence of a microclimatic regulation mechanism benefiting corn, but not soybeans. My findings have implications for cost-benefit analyses of conservation policies, the spatial design of set-aside conservation programs (e.g., the Conservation Reserve Program), timber harvest scheduling in public forests, and the political economy of conservation. Forest conservation policies may represent an underappreciated yet cost-beneficial tool to bolster agricultural productivity.

JEL Classification Codes: Q15, Q23, Q51, Q58