Working Papers
Timing of reservations' allotment across courts' jurisdictions.
Who benefits from individual property rights? Evidence from the allotment of Mapuche reservations
With Robert Heilmayr
Individual property rights can improve economic efficiency but may simultaneously expose marginalized groups to dispossession. This paper exploits spatial discontinuities in court congestion and novel data sources to quantify the long-term impacts of individual rights on the socioeconomic conditions of Mapuche reservations and their descendants.
The persistence of gender landholding biases in a historically patrilineal society
Gender bias against women in land ownership can be exacerbated by practices rooted in historical patrilineal kinship systems. This paper combines newly digitized records from historical and current property titles to study patrilineal gender biases in landholdings in Mapuche society in the 2000s, a century after their forced incorporation into Chile.
Representation of kinship structure of reservation at the time of forced settlement.
Livestock grassing in Araucanía, Chile.
Environmental impacts of indigenous land restitution in Chile
With Dany Jaimovich, Robert Heilmayr, and Matías Black
In an effort to redress historical dispossession and support indigenous self-determination, multiple countries have adopted policies that return land back to indigenous peoples. Such land restitution programs are partially motivated by a hope that restitution will enable indigenous communities to restore land to more traditional uses and, as a result, generate public environmental benefits. However, little is known about how indigenous communities change land use after land is returned to their stewardship. Here we study the land use impacts of a Chilean restitution program that, between 1994 and 2023, returned more than 200,000 hectares of land to Mapuche communities. Using a difference-indifferences research design, we find that land restitution led to more grasslands, a traditional Mapuche use of land, and fewer non-native forest plantations, a use of land that Mapuche have frequently protested against. However, restitution did not change the extent of natural forests. Given this reconfiguration in land use, restitution has led to insignificant changes in carbon sequestration or biodiversity. Our results complicate common narratives that indigenous land reform will always yield improvements in environmental outcomes. Careful consideration of the local cultural context and the legacies of dispossession can help set appropriate expectations for the environmental co-benefits of these reforms.
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.
Difference-in-differences impact of Indigenous Law on Mapuche ownership.
Evolution of land cover within five kilometers of reservations between 1973 and 2016.
The rise of forest plantations in Chile's Mapuche's homeland: Four decades of land cover estimates from a CNN-RNN model and the Landsat program
This paper develops a CNN-RNN deep learning architecture that combines low resolution satellite imagery from the 1970s with modern contemporary satellite imagery to deliver state-of-the-art decadal land-cover maps for the core of Mapuche's ancestral territory.
Work in Progress
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.
Forestry plantation around Mapuche community near Galvarino, Chile.
Mapuche individuals listed in a reservation's property title
The persistent effects of community fractionalization: Evidence from indigenous reservations
With Alejandro Corvalán and Dany Jaimovich
Extensive literature has explored the effects of ethnic diversity and polarization on economic development and conflicts, finding mostly negative effects at the country level. These results tend to be similar for smaller communities, particularly when a colonizer or another kind of external ruler forcibly imposes the coexistence of different groups. This paper leverages novel digitized historical data to study the persistent effects of historical intra-ethnic lineage diversity in the indigenous Mapuche reservations of Southern 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.
Drivers of global forest loss, from Curtis et al. (2018).
Publications
Scientific Journals
- Jordán, F., 2025. Prompt payment enforcement on framework agreements for public hospitals: evidence from Chile. Fiscal Studies, 46(2), pp. 167-183. [Journal] [Ungated Version]
- Jordán, F., 2025. Varieties of capitalism and environmental performance. Ecological Economics. 227, 108362. [Journal] [Ungated Version]
- Jordán, F. and Di Gregorio, E., 2024. The diversity we breath: Community diversity and gas leak management in Boston. Regional Science & Urban Economics. 108, 104037. [Journal] [Ungated Version]
- Daoud, A., Jordán, F., Sharma, M., Johansson, F., Dubhashi, D., Paul, S. and Banerjee, S., 2023. Using satellite images and deep learning to measure health and living standards in india. Social Indicators Research, 167(1), pp. 475-505. [Open Access]
- Engel, E., Jordán, F., Rau, T. and Repetto, A., 2023. Audit threats and year-end spending by government agencies: Experimental evidence from Chile. Journal of Public Procurement, 23(1), pp. 100-124. [Journal] [Ungated Version]
Other Publicatios
- Jaimovich, D., & Jordán, F. 2025. Indigenous property and economic development under Pinochet dictatorship. In F. Gonzalez & M. Prem (Eds.), The Pinochet Shock: Radical Change and Life Under Dictatorship. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. [Ungated Version]