ABSTRACT: Ecotourism is often hailed as a development and conservation strategy. It requires intact landscapes to generate employment and income. Yet, whether this sector in fact improves environmental outcomes relative to the baseline is unclear. To a sparse literature, I add rigorous empirical evidence of heterogeneous impacts and mechanisms underlying them. The current absence of evidence stems in part from challenges of locating ecotourism in space, which I address by exploiting the introduction of ecotourism specific concessions in the Peruvian Amazon. I use Synthetic Controls for every ecotourism concessions as a valid counterfactual to estimate effects on conservation outcomes. I then use explanatory sequantial mixed methods, using qualitative evidence from in depth and semi-structure interviews gathered in the field  to reveal the underlying mechanisms and factors for success. A few concessions, clustered in groups, are successful in conserving more forest versus a counterfactual, while on average concessions did not not have a statistically significant effect on deforestation. The heterogeneity of forest impacts aligns with prior emphases on active presence on the ground, strong market connections and diversification, and regulatory compliance as key inputs into ecotourism success. These findings inform current debates on the potential and limitations of ecotourism as a conservation tool, emphasizing the need to move beyond average treatment effects and toward an institutional and contextual understanding of when, where, and why ecotourism can contribute to forest protection.

ABSTRACT: Do resource-extraction booms deter postsecondary education? We explore this question by examining the higher education-related decisions of Chilean high school graduates during the 2000s commodities boom. Mineral extraction boosts enrollment in technical education but lowers completion rates for four-year professional degrees. Effects vary by economic background, with dropout rates higher among public high school graduates, typically serving low-income groups. Our study highlights the unequal impact of natural resources on human capital accumulation across income groups within resource-rich developing economies

ABSTRACT: Using an online multi-country video-vignette survey experiment, we measure bias against extractive industries and foreign firms in individuals perceptions and preferences related to industrial projects with potential economic benefits and environmental costs. Individuals face a hypothetical industrial investment project with a randomly assigned implementing firm, which varies in one or two dimensions: nationality (foreign or national), and industrial sector (extractive or generic). We elicit several incentivized and non-incentivized measures of acceptance of hypothetical investments. We find a precisely estimated null effect on willingness to pay to block the projects across experimental treatments: respondents express similar reactions to the same information independently of the firms origin or industrial sector.