Does mining activity lead to deforestation? How does investor origin affect the environmental impacts of mining operations? We investigate these questions by estimating the causal impact of mineral price changes on deforestation near mining sites. Combining global mine propertylevel data with high-resolution satellite imagery on forest cover, we find a positive elasticity of deforestation to mineral price shocks. This elasticity is significantly lower when mine owners are from countries with higher income or better institutions, but it is not affected by host country characteristics. Evidence suggests that mine owners from higher-income countries induce different types of local economic activity.

We study the unintended effects of Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plans developed by 26 states in the 1960s to address insurance redlining in urban neighborhoods. FAIR plans’ problematic features included prohibitions on considering environmental hazards in underwriting, mandatory insurer participation in pools that diluted underwriting incentives, and payouts exceeding market values in declining areas. Using a triple-difference design comparing pre/post-FAIR periods, neighborhoods with/without likely FAIR access, and participating/non-participating states, we find that FAIR inadvertently led to significant housing disinvestment and accelerated declines in neighborhood population, with simultaneous increases in the Black population share.

We study how a significant relaxation of internal migration restrictions affects labor market outcomes of incumbent migrants and natives, exploiting the 2014 hukou reform in China, which substantially removed the migration barriers of cities with an urban population below 5 million (nonmegacities). Using a difference-in-differences method, we find that migrants’ wages in nonmegacities experienced approximately a 2.6%–7.9% decline relative to that in megacities after the policy. The policy had nonnegative impacts on the wages of natives in nonmegacities. These results suggest that the downward wage pressure imposed by new migrants falls primarily on incumbent migrants rather than on natives.