We explore heat-related labor impacts both for their own interest and to understand the role of adaptation in responding to climate change. Focusing on non-agricultural sectors in the United States, we find that hot temperatures exert a causal negative impact on county-level payroll – reducing payroll by several percentage points in a 2◦C hotter year – with larger impacts in highly exposed indu...

We test for long-term damages from precipitation shocks in rural Brazil by observing wages of households that have permanently migrated from rural to urban areas. We find that large short-term precipitation shocks damage migrants’ long-term wages. We offer an analytical explanation for this outcome: credit-constrained households may be willing to accept lower wages in urban areas following the ...

This paper examines the recent experience with insurance and other risk-financing instruments in developing countries in order to gain insights into the effectiveness of these instruments in reducing economic insecurity. Insurance and other risk financing strategies are viewed as efforts to recover from negative income shocks through risk pooling and transfer. Specific examples of public-privat...

Understanding the potential impacts of climate change on economic outcomes requires knowing how agents might adapt to a changing climate. We exploit large variation in recent temperature and precipitation trends to identify adaptation to climate change in US agriculture, and use this information to generate new estimates of the potential impact of future climate change on agricultural outcomes....

An identity links the rate of economic growth, the speed of poverty reduction and changes in the distribution of income during some time period in a given country. A few authors used that identity to understand the causes for observed changes in poverty and to identify the exact role of economic growth in poverty reduction. Yet, many empirical cross-country studies of the relationship between g...