Collective property rights lead to secondary forest growth in the Brazilian Amazon.

Forests serve a crucial role in our fight against climate change. Secondary forests provide important potential for conservation of biodiversity and climate change mitigation. In this paper, we explore whether collective property rights in the form of indigenous territories (ITs) lead to higher rates of secondary forest growth in previously deforested areas. We exploit the timing of granting of property rights, the geographic boundaries of ITs and two different methods, regression discontinuity design and difference-in-difference, to recover causal estimates. We find strong evidence that indigenous territories with secure tenure not only reduce deforestation inside their lands but also lead to higher secondary forest growth on previously deforested areas. After receiving full property rights, land inside ITs displayed higher secondary forest growth than land outside ITs, with an estimated effect of 5% using our main RDD specification, and 2.21% using our difference-in-difference research design. Furthermore, we estimate that the average age of secondary forests was 2.2 y older inside ITs with secure tenure using our main RDD specification, and 2.8 y older when using our difference-in-difference research design. Together, these findings provide evidence for the role that collective property rights can play in the push to restore forest ecosystems.

Climate change and state evolution.

Despite the vast evidence on the short-run effects of adverse climate shocks on the economy, our understanding of their long-run impact on institutions is limited. To tackle such a key issue, a vast body of research has focused on ancient societies because of the limited complexity of their economies and their unparalleled experience with environmental and institutional change. Notably, the "collapse archaeology" literature has reported countless correlations consistent with the mantra that severe droughts are bound to trigger institutional crises. This conclusion, however, has been recently challenged by a stream of papers that, building on more detailed data on Bronze Age Mesopotamia and a more credible theory-based empirical strategy, have yielded the following two results. First, severe droughts pushed the elites to grant strong political and property rights to the nonelites to convince them that a sufficient part of the returns on joint investments would be shared via public good provision and, thus, to cooperate and accumulate a culture of cooperation. Second, a more favorable climate allowed the elites to elicit cooperation under less inclusive political regimes as well as a weaker culture of cooperation and, possibly, incomplete property rights. These patterns emphasize the importance of considering the asymmetric effect of droughts and, more generally, combining natural and social sciences for the evaluation of climate-related policies.

Ethical Considerations and Fundamental Principles of Large Language Models in Medical Education: Viewpoint.

This viewpoint article first explores the ethical challenges associated with the future application of large language models (LLMs) in the context of medical education. These challenges include not only ethical concerns related to the development of LLMs, such as artificial intelligence (AI) hallucinations, information bias, privacy and data risks, and deficiencies in terms of transparency and interpretability but also issues concerning the application of LLMs, including deficiencies in emotional intelligence, educational inequities, problems with academic integrity, and questions of responsibility and copyright ownership. This paper then analyzes existing AI-related legal and ethical frameworks and highlights their limitations with regard to the application of LLMs in the context of medical education. To ensure that LLMs are integrated in a responsible and safe manner, the authors recommend the development of a unified ethical framework that is specifically tailored for LLMs in this field. This framework should be based on 8 fundamental principles: quality control and supervision mechanisms; privacy and data protection; transparency and interpretability; fairness and equal treatment; academic integrity and moral norms; accountability and traceability; protection and respect for intellectual property; and the promotion of educational research and innovation. The authors further discuss specific measures that can be taken to implement these principles, thereby laying a solid foundation for the development of a comprehensive and actionable ethical framework. Such a unified ethical framework based on these 8 fundamental principles can provide clear guidance and support for the application of LLMs in the context of medical education. This approach can help establish a balance between technological advancement and ethical safeguards, thereby ensuring that medical education can progress without compromising the principles of fairness, justice, or patient safety and establishing a more equitable, safer, and more efficient environment for medical education.

The Pluralities of Property.

In Property Rights: A Re-Examination, James Penner returns to and develops a project that he has been engaged in for nearly three decades: to replace the influential 'bundle of rights' picture of property, which he regards as irredeemably flawed, with an alternative account-one that regards property as a unified entitlement. In this review article, I expound and analyse the central features of Penner's theory. I defend the view that, in its original iteration, Penner's account was trebly monistic: it regarded property as a single entitlement justified by a single human interest and protected by a single duty of non-interference. I go on to critically examine one of Penner's central ideas-that to understand property it is necessary to understand its justification. Along the way, I trace how Penner's account has evolved and explain how certain alterations have put some problems to bed while generating others.