The effect of First Nations modern treaties on local income /

Finally, they define the scope of Aboriginal rights to harvest wildlife and use land for traditional purposes.2 This clarification of property rights has the potential to reduce transaction costs for the development of extractive industries, such as mining and forestry, near Aboriginal communities. [...] In BC, the first modern treaty was the Nisga’a Final Agreement (2000).3 Figure 1 displays the geographical distribution of First Nation communities with and without a modern treaty.4 In this paper, I refer to these bands as treaty and non-treaty bands. [...] Assessing Treaties’ Impact The aim of my empirical analysis is to assess the effect of modern treaties on real income of individuals living in First Nation communities.5 I focus on treaties implemented between 1991 and 2006 and restrict the sample to bands located in non-metropolitan areas in BC, the Northwest Territories and Yukon.6 There are several reasons for my sample choice. [...] The data comes from two main sources: Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC 2015) and confidential individual records from the long-form population census.8 Census data cover the period 1991 to 7 I use the date of the implementation plan as the beginning of treaty implementation. [...] By assuming that, conditional on the control variables, income would have followed the same trend in the absence of treaties, this difference in trends provides an estimate of the effect of modern treaties.