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International agreements to reduce anthropogenic environmental disasters rely on public pressure driving local action. We study whether focused media and increased public outcry can drive local environmental action, reducing environmental damage. Although an annual affair, forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon received unprecedented public scrutiny in August 2019. Comparing active fires in Brazil versus those in Peru and Bolivia in a difference-in-differences design, we find that increased public attention reduced fires by 22% avoiding 24.8 million MtCO2 in emissions. Our results highlight the power of public attention to compel local action on pressing environmental issues.

A recent boom in commodities-for-manufactures trade between China and other developing countries has led to much concern about the losers from rising import competition in manufacturing, but little attention on the winners from growing Chinese demand for commodities. Using census data for Brazil, we find that local labour markets more affected by Chinese import competition experienced slower growth in manufacturing wages and in-migration rates between 2000 and 2010, and greater rises in local wage inequality. However, in locations benefiting from rising Chinese demand, we observe higher wage growth, lower takeup of cash transfers and positive effects on job quality.

We study a situation where, as a consequence of private information, agents do not have the incentive to invest in a public good if they are unable to have prior discussion with their partners. We show that in a voluntary contribution mechanism with cheap talk, any finite message space does not provide efficiency gain relative to a binary message space when agents truthfully report their type. Using laboratory experiments, we observe that communication is a useful mechanism to enhance efficiency, mainly by allowing players to coordinate on the zero contribution when the project is not desirable for at least one of them. However, we find that such efficiency gain seems to be very limited, since the simplest communication structure ("Yes" or "No" messages) provides the same incentives to the agents as larger message spaces.

Argentinian photographer Matías Costa (born 1973) has documented various cultural expressions of grieving and the sufferings of children as well as more generally themed photo-essays undertaken on travels in Italy, China, France, Hungary, Turkey and the U.S. This volume reproduces a concise selection of his works.