Wallace E. Oates Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

Failures to conserve wildlife do not typically arise from an absence of conservation policies; they occur when existing policies are ineffective. From national laws prohibiting the killing of African elephants to international agreements governing the exploitation of marine animals, behavioral responses and enforcement capacity shape the extent to which conservation policies improve or worsen conservation outcomes. Causal estimates of the effects of conservation policies and their underlying mechanisms are largely unavailable, limiting the extent to which declines in wildlife abundance and biodiversity can be reduced and reversed. In the three chapters ofmy dissertation, I use causal inference econometrics, high-resolution data, and economic theory to begin to fill this knowledge gap. First, when regulators in Peru try to protect juvenile fish by temporarily closing specific areas of ocean, they inadvertently provide information about the location of schools of fish, resulting in large spillovers that cause the policy to backfire. Second, Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) protect fisheries from unauthorized fishing, but only in EEZs with fisheries valuable enough to justify enforcement costs. Third, armed conflict near elephant habitat increases elephant poaching. Gabriel Englander is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Environmental Markets Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In August 2022 he will join the Development Research Group of the World Bank (https://www.gabrielenglander.com/).