Working Papers
The Climate Impact of Wood Bioenergy Subsidies: A Structural Model of Forest Land Use
— Job Market Paper · [current draft]
Abstract (click to expand)
Wood bioenergy has become an important renewable energy source in the EU and UK, driven largely by generous subsidies. Yet burning wood emits more CO2 than coal at the smokestack. Any climate benefit therefore depends on how subsidies affect landowners’ decisions and whether the resulting change in forest carbon stocks offsets these emissions. I study the effects of these subsidies on landowners in the U.S. South—the world’s main export region for wood bioenergy—and find the opposite: the forest carbon sink weakens, reflecting reduced sequestration, making the policy counterproductive both at the point of emissions and in the forest. To identify these effects, I develop a dynamic structural model combining land-use and harvesting decisions under local oligopsony power to capture the trade-off landowners face between harvesting, costly replanting, and alternative land uses. The model is estimated on a panel of 5.1 million land plots built from remote-sensing data on land use, harvesting, and biomass. Results show that policy-induced harvesting is not offset by increases in planting, leading to net deforestation and declining forest carbon stocks. The impact is substantial: in 2024, the estimated reduction in annual carbon sequestration equals 1.4 percent of U.K. emissions, and by 2050, the social cost of lost forest carbon is projected to reach $53 billion. The analysis suggests that location-based sourcing restrictions could reverse this negative impact and deliver social benefits instead.Market Concentration & Deforestation: Evidence from the Brazilian Soy Industry
· [current draft]
Abstract (click to expand)
The Brazilian soy industry is a leading cause of deforestation in several major biomes, including the Amazon, yet little is known about how market structure affects land-use outcomes. This paper exploits the 2014 acquisition and merger of two major soy exporters by China’s state-owned firm COFCO to estimate the causal effects of buyer concentration on farmgate soy prices, production, and deforestation. Using a municipality-level panel from 2006–2018 linking supply-chain data, administrative data, and MapBiomas deforestation records, I implement a staggered event-study design to estimate local impacts of the merger. Results show a short-run increase in farmgate prices where buyer concentration rose — an unexpected effect consistent with strategic mutual forbearance among oligopsonists. In contrast, when COFCO enters new markets, I find that increased competition leads to sustained price increases and lower deforestation. One likely mechanism is COFCO’s deforestation-free sourcing commitments.Work in Progress
Incentives and Corruption in Panama: Evidence from Gasoline Markets
with Decio Coviello and Steven Lehrer
Abstract (click to expand)
This paper studies the misuse of public funds using transaction-level data from Panama’s national fuel card program, covering over two million purchases by government employees. We document both passive waste, arising from weak cost-minimization incentives, and active misuse, where employees personally benefit. We use the fuel programs rules to develop waste and misuse measures and exploit two distinct sources of variation in the incentives to misuse funds. A local price shock from a merger involving the contracted fuel supplier reduces misuse across most agencies, whereas, national fuel price shocks driven by exogenous oil market events increase it. We develop an economic model of expected profit and detection risk to explain these behavioral responses and their heterogeneity across agencies. Our estimates imply an elasticity of supply of stolen fuels between 2.7 and 4.6, meaning that a 10% rise in fuel prices increases stolen fuel by 27-46%.Environmental Regulation of Wood Processing Mills: The Boiler MACT Rule
Optimal Spatial Targeting of Wood Bioenergy Subsidies
Published Conference Proceedings
Making Transit Reliability Benefits Accessible to Engineers
with John Parker, International Conference on Transportation and Development, 2016
· [published version]