Dylan Brewer

Expansion of forest area through afforestation and reforestation is a popular strategy to mitigate climate change. However, the vast land area required suggests a potentially large tradeoff between forest expansion and agriculture. From 2003-2010, one of the largest forest expansion programs in India was implemented in Rajasthan state. Using a yearly, district-level panel from 1991 to 2017, we estimate the effects of this program on the agricultural sector using two-way fixed effects and synthetic difference-in-differences approaches. Perhaps counterintuitively, our findings indicate the program had no impact on cultivated area in Rajasthan, suggesting agriculture was not displaced by forests. We also find robust, statistically significant increases in total agricultural production and yield following the program’s implementation, which may have been partly driven by an increase in local rainfall or other ecosystem services resulting from increased forest cover. We discuss the implications of our findings for afforestation/reforestation as a climate mitigation strategy.

Expansion of forest area through afforestation and reforestation is a popular strategy to mitigate climate change. However, the vast land area required suggests a potentially large tradeoff between forest expansion and agriculture. From 2003-2010, one of the largest forest expansion programs in India was implemented in Rajasthan state. Using a yearly, district-level panel from 1991 to 2017, we estimate the effects of this program on the agricultural sector using two-way fixed effects and synthetic difference-in-differences approaches. Perhaps counterintuitively, our findings indicate the program had no impact on cultivated area in Rajasthan, suggesting agriculture was not displaced by forests. We also find robust, statistically significant increases in total agricultural production and yield following the program’s implementation, which may have been partly driven by an increase in local rainfall or other ecosystem services resulting from increased forest cover. We discuss the implications of our findings for afforestation/reforestation as a climate mitigation strategy.

This article provides an overview of the recent economics literature analyzing the effect of air pollution on health outcomes. We review the common approaches to measuring and modeling air pollution exposures and the epidemiological and biological literature on health outcomes that undergird federal air regulations in the United States. The article contrasts the methods used in the epidemiology literature with the causal inference framework used in economics. In particular, we review the common sources of estimation bias in epidemiological approaches that the economics literature has sought to overcome with research designs that take advantage of natural experiments. We review new promising research designs for estimating concentration-response functions and identify areas for further research.