'Donkey Business: Trade, Resource Exploitation, and Crime'

The Global Studies Seminar presents “Donkey Business: Trade, Resource Exploitation, and Crime” by Denison University’s Assistant Professor Vinicius Curti Cícero.

This paper examines the relationship between the institutionalization of a renewable resource market with poorly defined property rights and local crime rates. We focus on the regulation of the donkey hide trade in Brazil, driven by foreign demand for ejiao, a Traditional Chinese Medicine product. Using a quasi-experimental research design, we leverage the timing of regulatory measures alongside spatial variations in donkey populations across Brazilian municipalities to provide causal evidence that the slaughtering of free-roaming donkeys led to an increase in crime and violence. We further explore the role of market illegality, finding that the impact on crime was twice as large during periods when the trade was illegal in Brazil. Our results carry important policy implications for developing countries grappling with resource booms and weak property rights. These findings emphasize the need for effective regulation, robust monitoring, and enforcement mechanisms to mitigate the social costs associated with natural resource exploitation.

Cícero grew up in the countryside of Brazil and completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees in economics at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), where he first became interested in how global shocks shape the lives of people in developing economies. He later moved to the United States to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy in economics at Colorado State University before joining Denison. 

His research sits at the intersection of international trade and economic development. He combines applied microeconomic methods with macroeconomic theory to study how trade- induced shocks influence structural change, political behavior, mortality, and crime, with a focus on the dynamics of development in Brazil and other emerging economies.