Fire is an important land management tool for smallholders in the Brazilian Amazon. However, when fires are not properly controlled they can give rise to large-scale wildfires that threaten forests, agricultural plantations, and settlement areas. We use data from a survey of 220 households to...

We use data from a survey of 2401 households living along the Transamazon highway to study timber sales decisions of smallholders settling in Amazon native forests. We develop an econometric approach, to study both the decision to harvest timber and the volume of timber sold, that corrects for...

We use spatially efficient logit models to explore the role of economic incentives on the expansion of cropland in the Mato Grosso region between 2001 and 2004. An empirical measure for agricultural economic rent is used to quantify the desirability of a particular plot of land, which previous...

Estimates of natural resource harvests often inform rural conservation and development strategies. Retrospective household surveys remain one of the most commonly employed methods for estimating harvests. Pair-wise comparisons of estimates from household surveys versus diary records were...

This study contributes to the design of public policies for the forestry sector in Madre de Dios, Peru. We developed a timber rent model that estimates optimal stumpage fees and compared three scenarios of harvestable areas access versus two harvest methods to calculate potential revenues to the...

In this article, we consider wildfire risk management decisions using a dynamic stochastic model of homeowner interaction in a setting where spatial externalities arise. Our central objective is to apply observations from the social science literature about homeowner preferences to this economic...