Research

ABSTRACT: Environmental degradation and economic development are two of the most pressing issues facing the world today, and public policy that aims to address one of these may unintentionally affect the other. I study the effect of an increase in environmental law enforcement on local economic conditions in rural Brazil. In the first part of this paper, I use data on more targeted anti-deforestation law enforcement activities, guided by satellite alerts, and link that to agricultural outcomes. I then exploit the staggered introduction of a policy that increases monitoring and enforcement in municipalities with a history of high deforestation, and link this to a range of economic development outcomes. I find that more targeted law enforcement reduces conversion rates of forest to pasture, and increases pasture quality. Furthermore, economic conditions in municipalities with stricter monitoring improve, indicating that environmental enforcement and economic development need not be at odds.

ABSTRACT: Trade policy can help support the diffusion of environmentally friendly goods and technologies, which are essential for the transition to a greener economy. Trade barriers make the green transition more expensive than necessary, so addressing these barriers is a core contribution of trade policy towards a more sustainable future. This paper investigates the effectiveness of trade agreements that specifically aim to boost and facilitate trade in environmental goods. We find that these trade agreements are not associated with increased trade in environmental goods. Trade flows between countries that have an FTA with so-called environmental goods provisions are not higher than between countries without such an agreement. 

ABSTRACT: The gravity model is widely used to estimate the effect of a reduction in trade costs on international trade flows. However, researchers face many analytical decisions in their choice for an empirical strategy. This paper uses a specification curve analysis method to study the effect of these choices on estimated trade effects. I find that despite significant heterogeneity in estimated trade effects, the distribution in the empirical international trade literature overlaps fairly well with the estimates in this specification curve analysis. 

Abstract: Conservative Talk Radio has long been a strong force in US politics. We provide new evi- dence on the electoral effects of Conservative Talk Radio in the historically consequential period of 1950 to 1970 using newly digitized archival records. Conservative radio hosts like Clarence Manion, Billy James Hargis, and Carl McIntire rapidly expanded their net- work during the early 1960s before the Kennedy administration took regulatory steps to dismantle their business model. We find that in counties where these shows aired on local stations, the Republican vote share increased following their introduction. Anticipatory effects are small and insignificant, which supports a causal interpretation of this effect.

ABSTRACT: Air pollution is a known health hazard, and evidence of negative effects beyond the health dimension is rapidly emerging. I study the effect on one non-health dimension, namely cognitive performance. I exploit exogenous variation in exposure to air pollution during secondary school exit-exams and estimate the contemporaneous effect on students’ cogni- tive performance in Colombia between 2012 and 2018. My results indicate that exposure to air pollution on the day of the exam itself negatively impacts students’ performance. Using variation in wind direction as an instrument for air pollution, I find that a one standard deviation increase in air pollution reduces overall test scores by 0.05 standard deviations. For students who continue to tertiary education, I find no evidence that this distorted signal of their cognitive abilities translates into differences in college attendance, as proxied by college graduation rates.

ABSTRACT: Seeding in tournaments is a process of creating a schedule based on performance in the recent past. It is used in many athletic disciplines to ensure that particularly attractive match ups do not occur until the later stages of the tournament. We exploit the discontinuous nature of the seeding system in the UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Europa League as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of being seeded. We find no evidence that seeding itself contributes positively to the team's success in the tournament. This finding is surprising given the substantial drop in average strength of the opponents for seeded teams and in striking opposition to the findings of previous studies.

ABSTRACT: Tutorials represent an integral feature of many courses in higher education. In this pre-registered study, we test whether assigning students to attend tutorials online affected learning outcomes relative to traditional classroom-based tutorials. Leveraging within-student variation in test scores, we find no evidence for differences in learning outcomes across modes of teaching.