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Over the last several decades, Brazil has become both the world's leading soy producer and the world's leading consumer of hazardous pesticides. Despite identified links between pesticide exposure and carcinogenesis, there has been little populationlevel research on the effects of pesticide intensification on broader human health in Brazil. We estimate the relationship between expanded soy production--and related community exposure to pesticides--on childhood cancer incidence using 15 y of data on disease mortality. We find a statistically significant increase in pediatric leukemia following expanded local soy production, but timely access to treatment mitigates this relationship. We show that pesticide exposure likely occurs via water supply penetration. Our findings represent only the tip of the iceberg for substantial health externalities of high-input crop production and land use change. Our results are of particular interest in developing contexts with demand for intensified food production systems and underscore the need for stronger regulation of pesticides and increased public health attention to exposure in the broader community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine two potential economic benefits of environmental policy, increased agricultural investment and productivity. This is important because if these benefits are realized, environmental policy could optimize land use for food production while minimizing the negative environmental impacts. We employ multiple empirical techniques to analyze a market-led and a public-led anti-deforestation policy that influence the vast cattle ranching sector in the Brazilian Amazon. We show that both policies increased cattle productivity, while the market-led policy also increased investment. We find no evidence that the two policies were substitutes or complements. Results indicate that the policies were each effective in different market- and land-use-contexts, so that enforcement of both policies increased productivity for a larger set of properties. Our research reveals both indirect and unintended benefits of environmental regulation, which have implications for the design of policies that affect the agricultural sector, a major driver of land-use change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. To empirically evaluate the relationship between presence of a state or federal prison and COVID-19 case and death counts. Methods. We merged data on locations of federal and state prisons and of local and county jails with daily case and death counts in the United States. We used a selection-on-observables design to estimate the correlation between prisons and COVID-19 spread, controlling for known correlates of COVID-19. Results. We found empirical evidence that the presence and capacities of prisons are strong correlates of county-level COVID-19 case counts. The presence of a state or federal prison in a county corresponded with a 9% increase in the COVID-19 case count during the first wave of the pandemic, ending July 1, 2020. Conclusions. Our results suggest that the public health implications of these facilities extend beyond the health of employees and incarcerated individuals, and policymakers should explicitly consider the public health concerns posed by these facilities when developing pandemic-response policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]