This paper measures the economic impact of climate change on US agricultural land by estimating the effect of random year-to-year variation in temperature and precipitation on agricultural profits. The preferred estimates indicate that climate change will increase annual profits by $1.3 billion in 2002 dollars (2002$) or 4 percent. This estimate is robust to numerous specification checks and re...

© A m Abstract: This paper investigates to what extent international migration can be explained by climatic variations. A gravity model of migration augmented with average temperature and precipitation in the country of origin is estimated using a panel data set of 142 sending countries for the period 1995 to 2006. We find two primary results. First, temperature is positively correlated with mi...

This study explores the reduction potential of greenhouse gases for major pollution emitting countries of the world using nonparametric productivity measurement methods and directional distance functions. In contrast to the existing literature we apply optimization methods to endogenously determine optimal directions for the efficiency analysis. These directions represent the compromise of outp...

This paper examines the impact of floods on firms’ capital accumulation, employment growth and productivity by using a difference-indifference approach and considering firms’ asset structure. We find evidence that after a flooding companies in flooded regions show on average higher growth of total assets and employment than firms in areas not affected by flooding. The positive effect prevails f...

Policies of lowering carbon demand may aggravate rather than alleviate climate change (green paradox). In a two-period three-country general equilibrium model with finite endowment of fossil fuel one country enforces an emissions cap in the first or second period. When that cap is tightened the extent of carbon leakage depends on the interaction of various parameters and elasticities. Condition...

We examine the effect of rainfall shocks on crimes against women using data from 583 Indian districts for 2002-2007. We find that a one standard deviation decline in annual rainfall from the local mean increases reported domestic violence by 4.4 percent and dowry deaths by 7.8 percent. Wet shocks have no apparent effect. These patterns are consistent with consumption smoothing by households rel...

To what degree can labor reallocation mitigate the economic consequences of weather-driven agricultural productivity shocks? I estimate that temperature-driven reductions in demand for India are associated with increases nonagricultural employment. This suggests ability sectors to absorb workers may play a key role attenuating shocks. Exploiting firm-level variation propensity workers, relative...

Do political elites use armed groups to foster civilian participation in genocidal violence? Are employed strategically? How do they mobilize civilians? I investigate these questions using data from the Rwandan Genocide. To establish causality, exploit exogenous variation groups’ transport costs induced by weather fluctuations: shortest distance of each village main road interacted with rainfal...

It seems to be a not uncommonly held view that intertemporal banking and borrowing of tradeable permits might tilt the ‘prices vs. quantities’debate towards looking relatively more favorably upon time-flexible quantities. The present paper shows that this view is incorrect for a natural dynamic extension of the original ‘prices vs. quantities’ information structure, which here allows the firms ...

Global climate change presents a classic problem of decision making under uncertainty with learning. We provide stochastic dominance theorems that provide new insights into when abatement and investment into low carbon technology should increase in risk. We show that R&D into low-carbon technologies and near-term abatement are in some sense opposites in terms of risk. Abatement provides insuran...