Full Citation
Title: Three Essays on the Impacts of Climate Change
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2022
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Abstract: This dissertation consists of three essays studying two issues of concern in environmental economics. Persistent changes in the climate affect the frequency and intensity of severe weather events worldwide, which impacts households and people as well as induces adaptive behavior in the long run. I look at how natural disasters, especially pluvial floods and air pollution affect household and individual welfare as well as their mitigative strategies. In Chapter 2, I examine how the occurrence of large-scale floods in Tanzania affects households’ value of crop production, income, expenditures, and life satisfaction. I use three-year nationally representative panel microdata from Tanzania, combined with satellite flood data, to analyze the impacts of the shocks using a kernel weighting difference-in-differences approach. I find a 34 percent decrease in the value of crop production for households living in affected villages or clusters two years after the shocks. I find no effects on total expenditures or child nutrition, but a significant negative effect on self-employment income and a persistent decrease in life satisfaction. Finally, access to safety nets or transfer income at baseline, and to forests in a village appears to have important mitigating effects. In chapter 3, I look at how women’s outcomes (i.e., intimate partner violence, fertility preferences) and children’s outcomes (i.e., mortality) are affected after households across Sub-Saharan Africa are exposed to large floods. Combining nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys with satellite flood data, I find that women living in flooded clusters experience a small but significant decline in emotional violence 2 by 0.04 percentage points, but I find no significant effect on physical violence from their partners. Fertility preferences change in that women decrease their ideal number of children by 5.3%.1 Child mortality increases, but only for children that are less than 6 months old. The results across subgroups show that only the poorest households experience an increase in physical violence, and households where both partners work in agriculture. The drop in fertility preferences is concentrated among women with little or no education. The decrease in female economic empowerment, increase in partner’s alcohol consumption, and a decrease in household wealth appear to be important mediating factors. The results should be treated with caution given the violation of the parallel pre-trends assumption and the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects. Another dimension of the changing climate is environmental pollution. In Chapter 4, I estimate the effects of exposure to ambient air pollution on daily health-related behaviors, weekly labor supply, and workplace productivity among US individuals. Using an individual fixed-effects regression approach, I examine how daily changes in outdoor air quality influence the time spent on daily health-related activities. I find impacts only when the air quality index becomes very unhealthy or hazardous, in which case there is a 21% decrease in the minutes spent on outdoor sports and exercise activities, and a 260% increase in minutes spent watching TV. The decrease in physical activity can have longterm negative health consequences. I also implement an instrumental variable (IV) strategy using wind direction and atmospheric boundary layer height as exogenous shocks to satellite-based aerosols to investigate how changes in air pollution affect weekly labor supply and productivity. I find that increases in the total aerosol optical depth (AOD) have no effect overall on labor supply decisions, both the decision to go to work and weekly hours worked. There are also no significant effects on labor productivity as proxied by weekly earnings. The effects across subgroups also suggest differential effects in avoidance behaviors across the income levels, age groups, occupations, race, and ethnicity, especially when the air quality is very unhealthy or hazardous.
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Authors: Tiague, Berenger Djoumessi
Institution: THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
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Data Collections: IPUMS Time Use - ATUS, IPUMS Global Health - DHS
Topics: Natural Resource Management
Countries: Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria