Three Essays on the Impacts of Climate Change
2022-07
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Three Essays on the Impacts of Climate Change
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2022-07
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In this dissertation, the focus is on the impacts of natural disasters and extreme air pollution on household and individual welfare as well as mitigative strategies. In Chapter 1, I study the impacts of large-scale floods in Tanzania on 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 and I 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, and to forest in a village appears to have important mitigating effects.
In chapter 2, I look at how women outcomes (i.e., intimate partner violence, fertility preferences) and children’s outcomes (i.e., mortality and nutrition) are affected after households across Sub-Saharan Africa get exposed to large floods. Combining nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys with satellite flood data, I find that women living in flooded clusters experience an overall decline in emotional violence by 0.04 percentage points, but no effect on physical violence from their partner. Fertility preferences change as women decrease their ideal number of kids by 5.3%. Child mortality also increases but only for children that are 6 months old or less. The results across subgroups show that only the poorest households experience an increase in physical violence, as well as when both partners work in agriculture. The drop in fertility preferences is concentrated among women with little to no education. The decrease in female economic empowerment, increase in partner’s alcohol consumption, and household wealth appear to be important mediating factors. The results should be taken with caution given the violation of parallel pre-trends and the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects.
Chapter 3 investigates another type of environmental shock, air pollution. I estimate the effects of exposure to ambient air pollution on daily health-related behaviors, weekly labor supply, and productivity at the workplace 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 that only when the air quality index becomes very unhealthy or hazardous, 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 increase in physical inactivity can have long-term 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 understand how changes in air pollution affect weekly labor supply and productivity. I find that increase in the total aerosol optical depth (AOD) leads to no overall change in labor supply decisions, both on the decision to go to work and the weekly worked hours. There are also no overall significant effects on labor productivity proxied by weekly earnings. The effects across subgroups also suggest differential effects in avoidance behaviors across the income distribution, age groups, occupations, race, and ethnicity, especially when the air quality is very unhealthy or hazardous.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2022. Major: Applied Economics. Advisors: Jason Kerwin, Marc Bellemare. 1 computer file (PDF); viii, 176 pages.
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Djoumessi Tiague, Berenger. (2022). Three Essays on the Impacts of Climate Change. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/241754.
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