Economic Growth and Threatened and Endangered Species Listings: A VAR Analysis

ABSTRACT

We conduct several analyses to examine the link between threatened and endangered species listings and macroeconomic activity. Preliminary tests using ordinary least squares are run on both time series data on the national level and cross sectional data at the state level. The analysis is then extended using vector autoregressive (VAR) techniques. VAR results, impulse response functions and variance decompositions are reported to shed more light on the causal relationships between threatened and endangered species, GDP and population. Our results indicate that there is little or no empirical evidence that GDP growth rates lead to changes in the number of threatened and endangered species listings.

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