The impacts of restrictions to individual rights on indigenous lands

With Dany Jaimovich and Robert Heilmayr

Many countries in the Americas impose restrictions on Indigenous land transactions to preserve Indigenous ownership, but these policies may inhibit economic growth. This paper evaluates the impact of Chile’s 1993 Indigenous Law, which restricts the transfer, lease, and mortgaging of land in Mapuche territories. Using property records, we find that the law has slowed Mapuche territorial loss. However, its effectiveness has declined over time, coinciding with a reduction in properties registered in the Public Registry of Indigenous Territories (PRIT), a key enforcement tool. Analysis of property sales following owner deaths underscores the PRIT’s critical role, with listed properties experiencing lower sales rates and smaller reductions in Indigenous ownership compared to unlisted properties. Using remotely sensed data and two complementary identification strategies, we reject meaningfully large impacts of PRIT on land use. The results highlight that transfer restrictions on individual property rights can serve as an effective tool to protect Indigenous ownership without imposing significant economic burdens, although special attention should be given to the design of enforcement mechanisms to ensure their effective implementation.

IDB working paper

Forestry plantations and the demise of rural livelihoods

With Robert Heilmayr

As part of global targets to reforest the world, many developing countries have made ambitious commitments to rapidly expand the area of plantation forests. In many cases, these commitments have been motivated by a desire to encourage rural economic development and improve living standards for marginalized, rural communities. However, evidence of the economic impacts of plantation forests are scarce. This paper helps fill this gap by exploiting quasi-experimental variation underpinning the expansion of forestry plantations in Chile.

Policy design for effective and equitable reductions in deforestation emissions

With Catharina Latka, Kathy Baylis, Robert Heilmayr, Andrew Platinga, Laurel Abowd, Roberto Amarales Santos, and Gavin McDonald

The design of forest conservation policies significantly influences their environmental and welfare impacts, cost-effectiveness, and distributional consequences. In this paper, we first develop a theoretically-founded econometric model of land users' deforestation decisions using global, spatially-granular data. We then use this model to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of carbon taxes and Payment for Ecosystem Services under various assumptions regarding the information available to policymakers.