PhD Candidate in Economics
Goethe University Frankfurt
I am a PhD candidate at Goethe University Frankfurt. I work on the economics of deforestation, with a special focus on Indigenous territories of the Amazon. My research asks how land rights and the financial system shape what happens to forests, combining administrative records with spatial data. I also study household beliefs and expectations, and how they shape financial decisions.
Contact: jeanoli@stud.uni-frankfurt.de
Working Papers
Branches and Roots: Banking Presence and Deforestation in Amazonian Indigenous Lands
Job Market Paper
Indigenous lands shelter much of the Brazilian Amazon’s intact forest, yet illegal deforestation inside their boundaries has been climbing despite formal legal protection. We exploit a sharp expansion and subsequent contraction of the region’s bank-branch network between 2008 and 2024 to ask whether local banking presence affects deforestation inside nearby Indigenous lands. We find that each additional branch near an Indigenous land lowers cumulative forest loss inside that area by roughly 2.5 km² over five years. Mediation analysis attributes the bulk of this effect to a single channel: bank presence raises local social capital, and exogenous variation in social capital in turn lowers deforestation. By contrast, we find no evidence that either local economic conditions or access to capital for clearing transmits the effect.
PDF (coming soon) Interactive Online Appendix
Actual and Perceived Financial Knowledge over the Life Cycle
What happens when households believe they know more than they actually do about financial matters? I use causal evidence to show that overconfidence leads households to drain their retirement savings early, fall behind on their mortgages, and lean too heavily on credit cards. A calibrated life-cycle model then traces how the damage compounds across the working years and lands hardest in the retirement years.
Work in Progress
Carbon Contracting on Brazilian Indigenous Lands
Too Uncertain to Listen: Trust and the Updating of Household Inflation Expectations
Causal Effects of War Framing on Inflation Expectations
Publications
In Engineering
New Technologies for Newborn Safety
[Patent] Oral Feeding Readiness Prediction System for Neonates. Korean Intellectual Property Office, 2024.
Quantitative non-nutritive sucking measurement as a predictor of oral feeding readiness in newborns. (Frontiers in Pediatrics, 2023)
A silver nanowire-based flexible pressure sensor to measure the non-nutritive sucking power of neonates. (Micro & Nano Systems Letters, 2020)