Overview
During the fire season across Brazil's Legal Amazon from 2009 to 2019, more than a third of all respiratory disease hospitalizations were among children under 14. Deforestation is a textbook externality: people clearing trees capture private gains while surrounding communities bear health costs from smoke and changes in local climate. Existing studies have linked deforestation to hospitalizations, malaria, diarrhea, and child stunting, but they mostly look at one country or one health outcome at a time, and none use causal identification across multiple countries simultaneously.
I'm proposing an instrumental variables strategy to estimate whether deforestation causes worse health outcomes for young children in tropical developing countries. The core challenge is that deforestation is endogenous: it clusters in poor areas with bad governance, so it's hard to separate the effect of tree loss from underlying poverty. My proposed instrument exploits the fact that unusually dry years cause more burning during land clearing. Whether a given year is dry is effectively random with respect to child health, but it strongly predicts how much fire and smoke communities near deforestation experience.
The data will come from three sources: the Hansen Global Forest Change Dataset for satellite-derived tree cover loss, NASA FIRMS for active fire data, and DHS Surveys for child health outcomes across tropical developing countries.
This project is in the early proposal stage. The identification strategy, literature review, and data sources are established. Data assembly and estimation are next.