Job market paper

Low- and middle-income countries, with economic centers often located in vulnerable areas, are expected to bear the brunt of climate change impacts. Indonesia faces an elevated risk of disasters, with floods posing the most significant threat. In this paper, I first estimate the immediate effects of flooding on key economic variables, finding that more severe floods result in a larger reduction in aggregate economic indicators, reduced entry of new businesses, and a substantial depletion of firm-level capital stock, partially offset by increased labor hiring. Some of these effects are likely driven by firms' evolving perceptions of flood risk in flood-prone areas. To examine these anticipatory effects of flooding, I develop a model of firms that incorporates flood risk and endogenous entry decisions. The analysis reveals that perceived flood risk, rather than actual flood events, has a more significant impact on firm behavior. While installing flood defenses in flood-prone regions could help mitigate these impacts, the resulting gains are diminished due to equilibrium adjustments and reduced firm selection effects on market entry.

With Tim Besley
Media: VoxDev, Ideas for India, LSE Business Review, IGC Blog
Awards: Honorable mention for 2024 ADB-IEA Innovative Policy Research Award
CEPR Discussion Paper, no. 18046, 2023.

Phasing out coal-fired power in favor of renewables is a central part of the green transition. As well as reducing carbon emissions, it should have an immediate and perceptible benefit for air quality. This paper uses geocoded survey data from 51 countries to show that people living within 40 km of coal-fired power plants are indeed more dissatisfied with ambient air quality. We then construct the equivalent variation for closing down coal-fired power plants and find that air quality benefits support the case for a green transition, with implications for policy action in this area.

With Javad Shamsi and Ranjana Sinha
Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4939241.

Climate-related protests have become increasingly widespread across the world. This paper empirically investigates the impact of climate protests on public awareness and subsequent political behavior. First, we document that such protests significantly elevate climate change awareness, as evidenced by increased Google search intensity for climate-related topics and heightened media coverage in both the United States and Europe. We then demonstrate that this surge in public interest translates into tangible political action. Specifically, we observe that the widespread Fridays for Future protests in Europe increased support for Green parties in the 2019 European Parliamentary elections. Additionally, we employ textual analysis to present suggestive evidence of the protests' influence on the prioritization of climate issues in UK Parliamentary speeches. Our findings suggest that climate protests have the potential to shape policy discourse.

With Tim Besley and Michael Callen
Developing Climate & Nature Module for the Gallup World Poll. Funding secured.

In preliminary analysis stage. Funding secured.

Theoretical model is ready, empirical analysis pending.

With James Rising, Kevin Schwarzwald, and Ana Trisovic
Media: Open Sustainable Technology, No Hesitations Blog
Journal of Open Source Education, 7(75), 90, 2024.

The use of econometrics to study how social, economic, and biophysical systems respond to weather has started a torrent of new research. It is allowing researchers to better understand the impacts of climate change, disaster risk and responses, resource management, human behavior, and sustainable development. In light of this, we present a new tutorial that offers step-by-step guidance on carrying out a climate econometric analysis. Moreover, it features reusable code snippets in multiple programming languages and points to several pre-existing packages while providing some introductory comments on their appropriate use.

With Tim Besley
British Academy Policy Brief, August 12, 2022.

With Tim Besley, Richard Davies, and Nick Stern
Economics Observatory, September 30, 2020.