Email
v.salazar-restrepo@lse.ac.uk

Office Address
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE

Placement Officer
Matthias Doepke

Supervisors
Oriana Bandiera
Gharad Bryan
Robin Burgess 
Daniel Sturm

References
Oriana Bandiera
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
o.bandiera@lse.ac.uk

Gharad Bryan
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
g.t.bryan@lse.ac.uk

Robin Burgess
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
r.burgess@lse.ac.uk

Daniel Sturm
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
d.m.sturm@lse.ac.uk

Does Conservation Work in General Equilibrium? (with Gabriel Leite-Mariante)
Deforestation and the subsequent use of deforested land for agricultural activities account for roughly 20% of the global CO2-equivalent emissions in the past two decades. Leading strategies to reduce deforestation are locally targetted. While potentially effective at a local level, their overall impact may be overstated if deforestation is displaced to untreated regions. In order to understand how they operate in general equilibrium, we build a quantitative multi-sector spatial model of the Brazilian economy with trade and migration, in which agricultural land is the output of a costly process of deforestation. We then simulate a counterfactual scenario in which deforestation is banned (with perfect enforcement) in some regions. Our main findings suggest that targeting deforestation hotspots can be an effective tool to curb aggregate deforestation in Brazil. Leakage is relatively small, but much higher in the long run. After one year, less than 2% of the deforestation reductions are outdone by leakage. Simulating the model forward for 20 years, up to 8%. This framework also allows us to quantify the effects of deforestation on the sectoral composition of the economy and on aggregate GDP.

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Working papers

 On the Coevolution of Cooperation and Social Institutions (with Balazs Szentes). R&R at the European Economic Review.

This paper considers an environment cohabited by selfish individuals andunconditional cooperators. Individuals are randomly matched and play thePrisoner’s Dilemma Game. Institutional capital facilitates cooperation amongplayers and selfish individuals have to pay a cost in order to identify situationswhere defection is unpunished. This paper considers the coevolution of typesand institutional capital. Both the type distribution and capital evolve accord-ing to a myopic best-response dynamics. The set of equilibria are shown to bePareto ranked. The main result is that any equilibrium level of institutionalcapital exceeds the long-run optimal amount. So, the long-run optimal insti-tutions don’t only maintain a more cooperative culture but are also cheaperthan equilibrium ones.

Works in progress

Equilibrium Effects of a billion trees on ecosystems and livelihoods: Evidence from Pakistan (with Amen Jalal and Mathieu Decuyper) 

Land titling and anticipatory land use change in Colombia's 1961 Land Reform