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Title: Essays in Environmental Economics
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2023
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Abstract: This dissertation studies the role of migration adaptation channel and the effectiveness of existing public policies towards climate change. Chapter 1 starts from the fact that post-Katrina (New Orleans) migration behaviors largely differ from the prediction suggested by the existing migration model used for the adaptation analysis. Katrina migrants disproportionately moved to urban places in the region in which New Orleans is located, which violates location’s equal substitutability assumption imposed in the extant literature. On this subject, I develop a full-fledged dynamic nested logit migration framework, in which nests depend on both geography and location’s characteristics, that allows for heterogeneous migration responses. Then, I propose a reduced-form approach to identify and estimate migration elasticities governing the asymmetric migration response. Through simulation, I verify that my model offers a prediction about the disproportionate nature of migrants’ relocation (Katrina), better than previous models do. Finally, my model delivers an important policy implication that there should also be public assistance designed to mitigate congestion effects in destinations that are close substitutes, caused by overflow of migrants. Chapter 2, joint with Xinle Pang, explores the welfare implications of flood relief policies. We develop a quantifiable general equilibrium migration model with rich geographic linkages, industry structure, and flood risk for this analysis. We also apply the Neural Network approach to overcome the curse of high dimensionality in the simulation. We show that existing post-Harvey relief transfer improves U.S. welfare compared to a zero-relief economy. Chapter 3, joint with Douglas Noonan and Lilliard Richardson, utilizes the Regression Discontinuity (RD) design with two unique parcel-level datasets to examine the actual effect of flood zoning policy on the housing market as well as the flood risk discontinuity at floodplain boundaries.
Url: https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/files/final_submissions/28223
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Authors: Sun, Pin
Institution: The Pennsylvania State University
Department: Economics
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Pages: 1-194
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Migration and Immigration, Population Data Science, Population Mobility and Spatial Demography
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