Violence and Deforestation in Brazil in 2008-2019 : An Econometric Study

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between deforestation and violence using annual municipal level data for the 2008-2019 time period, for both the Cerrado biome and the Legal Amazon. We contribute to the current literature in two ways. First, we extend the existing statistical work to cover the Cerrado biome as well as the Legal Amazon, which expands the relevant sample size almost four-fold. Second, we explore the time series aspect of the relationship. Our results show that for 2008-2019, considering time and location, and controlling for municipal level factors, violence (murder and murder attempts) and deforestation are significant predictors of each other in the same municipality and year. Our results are robust to different econometric specifications of the model