Eduardo Souza Rodrigues

Eduardo Souza Rodrigues

Kernan Brothers Postdoctoral Fellow in Environment, Harvard University Center for the Environment at Harvard University (2012-2013)
Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto
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Eduardo Souza Rodrigues is an economist interested in the causes of the deforestation in the Amazon and in the costs and effectiveness of the policies that promote conservation. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto. Eduardo received a B.A. in 2000 and a M.Sc. in 2003 both in Economics from the University of Sao Paulo. He then worked for three years at the Brazilian Central Bank. After that, he started in the Economics program at Yale University in 2006 and completed his Ph.D. in 2012. His Ph.D. research estimated the demand for deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and, based on this estimate, investigated the impacts of three policy intervention: (a) payments to avoid deforestation; (b) Pigouvian taxes on agricultural land; and (c) quantitative limits in land-use. He concluded that both payments and taxes would have been effective in avoiding deforestation, while quantitative limits would have been too costly for local farmers. He also developed nonparametric estimators that can be applied to land-use choice models using micro data, as well as to other similar contexts. As an Environmental Fellow, Eduardo worked with Professor Ariel Pakes. He developed and estimated a dynamic model of land use decision for the Brazilian Amazon. The model serves two purposes: First, it is used to estimate the elasticity of deforestation (and of emissions of carbon) with respect to commodity prices. Second, it is used to evaluate dynamic implications of environmental policies.

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