Lack of property rights is associated with lower investment, development, and welfare. In the Brazilian Amazon, insecure property rights have historically led to civil conflicts and deforestation, which would be expected to provide incentives for landowners to seek formal title. In this paper, we construct a novel database of land prices in Brazil to measure the market value of formal title to land and compliance with environmental regulation. Using online advertisements of land sale offers scraped from a widely used seller’s platform, we first estimate a hedonic model that regresses the last offer price on property attributes such as farm-level agricultural production, land characteristics, structure amenities, and capital equipment included in the offer, as well as spatial and temporal fixed effects. We use this hedonic model to examine how property rights and environmental compliance capitalize into land prices across the Amazon and Cerrado biomes. Our main results imply low net benefits from property rights and low net benefits from compliance with the central Brazilian regulation that aims to maintain forest cover, the Forest Code. Finally, we estimate a duration model that follows the sequence of weekly offers for a specific property until it sells. Our findings show that parcels compliant with the Forest Code sell 46 % faster in the Amazon, while entitled properties in the Cerrado sell 9 % faster, unless they are compliant with the Forest Code, which requires a substantial portion of the property to be under native vegetation cover.

中文翻译：

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巴西产权和环境政策的价值：来自新土地价格数据库的证据


缺乏产权与较低的投资、开发和福利有关。在巴西亚马逊地区，不安全的产权历来导致内战和森林砍伐，这有望激励土地所有者寻求正式所有权。在本文中，我们构建了一个巴西土地价格的新型数据库，以衡量正式土地所有权的市场价值和环境法规的遵守情况。使用从广泛使用的卖方平台上抓取的土地出售报价的在线广告，我们首先估计了一个特征模型，该模型对房地产属性（例如农场水平的农业生产、土地特征、结构设施和资本设备中包含的资本设备）的最后报价进行回归。提供，以及空间和时间固定效应。我们使用这种享乐模型来研究产权和环境合规性如何转化为亚马逊和塞拉多生物群落的土地价格。我们的主要结果意味着产权带来的净收益较低，遵守旨在维持森林覆盖的巴西中央法规（《森林法》）带来的净收益也较低。最后，我们估计一个持续时间模型，该模型遵循特定房产的每周报价顺序，直至其售出。我们的研究结果显示，符合《森林法》的地块在亚马逊地区的销售速度要快 46%，而塞拉多的授权财产的销售速度要快 9%，除非它们符合《森林法》（森林法要求大部分财产必须属于本地财产）植被覆盖。