Research Projects
Ongoing Works (Working Papers Available Upon Request):
- Extraction, Recycling, and the Environmental and Health Costs of Circularity
Primary extraction and recycling are substitutes in meeting current material demand but complements over time, because recycling draws on an urban mine that past extraction builds. This paper develops a dynamic model in which a social planner allocates supply between the two routes, tracking a focal metal through recoverable and unrecoverable stocks and three categories of environmental and health damage. Without geological scarcity, the urban mine is a leakage liability when collection capacity is slack and a scarce asset only when it binds; recycling need not displace primary production; and an anticipated improvement in recovery technology raises the value of preserving material only where capacity binds. A competitive market for recyclable material prices the mine’s intertemporal scarcity but never its environmental cost, so efficiency requires correcting both routes. A quantitative application to lithium shows that whether circularity lowers total social cost turns on the relative damage of the two supply routes rather than on recycling as such.
- Who Matters to Whom? Mapping Source–Destination Dependencies in Renewable Energy Supply Chains, with María-Eugenia Sanin
This paper develops an end-use-country–specific measure of supply-chain dependence for solar energy production using a multi-regional input–output network framework. By applying country–sector-specific counterfactual supply shocks across 44 countries and regions, the analysis traces how upstream disruptions propagate through global value chains and quantifies their downstream impact on solar output in each destination country. The resulting dependency measures identify, for each production stage, which source countries account for the largest shares of an end-use country’s exposure to upstream shocks. As an extension, the analysis incorporates second-order effects arising from trade diversion under supply constraints, allowing limited intermediate supply to be reallocated across downstream users. This generates additional indirect effects that can amplify and redistribute the impact of upstream disruptions across countries. The results show that dependencies vary markedly across countries and stages and cannot be inferred from global production concentration alone, as similar concentration levels often reflect fundamentally different structures, from domestic vertical integration to reliance on a narrow set of foreign upstream suppliers. By mapping source–destination dependencies within the production network, the analysis provides a network-based characterization of structural vulnerability in solar energy supply chains.
- Foreign Demand and Deforestation: Evidence from China’s Imports of Brazillian Beef
This paper examines how a large foreign demand shock affected land-use outcomes in Brazil following the surge in China’s beef imports after the 2018 African Swine Fever outbreak. Using Trase export flows and MapBiomas deforestation data for 2010–2023, the analysis exploits a Bartik instrument constructed from pre‑shock exposure to China to identify the response of municipalities already integrated into China-oriented supply chains. Instrumented increases in exports to China do not raise annual deforestation and are moderately negative on the integrated margin, with small negative effects in the Cerrado, near-zero effects in the Mata Atlântica, and imprecise estimates in the Amazon due to limited pre‑shock exposure. Placebo timing tests indicate that highly exposed municipalities were already on relatively lower deforestation trajectories prior to 2019. Overall, the findings suggest that additional foreign demand from the shock, transmitted through established, compliance-oriented export chains is absorbed along intensive margins or within previously cleared areas, while post‑shock entry into the China market is associated with higher clearing but is not causally identified.