On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Pigou (1920) pointed to uncompensated damage done to surrounding woods by sparks from railway enginesas the canonical example of an environmental externality. We study a modern corollary — illegal tropical forest fires used for clearing land — using 15 years of daily satellite data covering over 107,000 fires across Indonesia. We exploit variation in wind speed and in who owns surrounding land to generate variation in the degree to which the use of fire at a given time and place represents an externality. We find firms overuse fire relative to a case where all spread risks are internalized. However, firms appear partially sensitive to the risks of government punishment, which deters them from burning near protected forest or populated areas on particularly windy days. Counterfactuals suggest that if firms treated all surrounding land the way they treat neighboring populated areas, fires would be reduced by 80 percent.
