Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

The community forest concessions in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve provide a unique opportunity to investigate different aspects of community forest management. This dissertation examines the concessions in-depth and assesses the effectiveness of the concession policy in reducing deforestation, as well as how the preferences among concession members and non-members differ over various attributes of the concessions. The first chapter goes over the background and formation of the Maya Biosphere Reserve and the community forest concessions, which provides important context for the empirical analyses that follow. The second chapter examines how the heterogeneity of the concessions and their members affect deforestation in the reserve using matched difference-in-differences methods. The results indicate that the concession policy was effective in reducing deforestation among all types of concessions, although leakage was an issue in concessions comprised of recent immigrants that come from primarily agricultural backgrounds. The third chapter builds off the first by estimating selection bias due to the non-random assignment of areas into concession management that may not be controlled for in the matching process. This is possible due to the staggered timing of the formation of the concessions, where the treatment group is made up of the first concessions and the control group is comprised concessions that were created later. The results indicate that selection bias is present based on comparing the policy treatment effect using the later-formed concessions as a control group, with the treatment effect of a more traditional control group of adjacent forest areas. The fourth chapter uses data from a choice experiment conducted as part of a household survey of concession members and non-members. The experiment was designed to assess preferences over different attributes of the concessions, including the allocation of land to members, concession activities (ecotourism o (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brent Sohngen (Advisor); Douglas Southgate (Committee Member); Brian Roe (Committee Member) Subjects: Environmental Economics