Economics: Research Guide

Poor health at birth can have long-term consequences for children’s development. This paper analyses an important factor associated with health at birth: the time of year that the baby is born, and hence seasonal risks they were exposed to in utero. There are multiple potential explanations for seasonality in newborns’ health. Most previous research has examined these in isolation. We therefore do not know which explanations are most important – and hence which policy interventions would most effectively reduce the resulting early-life inequalities. In this paper, I use administrative data to estimate and compare the magnitudes of several seasonal risks, seeking to identify the most im..

Organizations are subject to a dual movement of evolution: in the short term, they must adapt to fluctuations of the economic, geopolitical, energy, health, situations and so on. In the long term, they must be part of major societal and environmental transformations. Corporate governance must assume this dual mission of strategic decision and social responsibility, to combine performance and responsibility, which can be particularly problematic in small enterprises with informal processes and limited resources. The objective of this research is to structure the development of positive governance in SMEs, while respecting its ethics and identity. Our application field is a small company in th..

To tackle the threat of climate change, countries worldwide have signed the Paris Agreement. This agreement aims to limit the global average temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius and potentially below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (UNFCCC 2015). Parties to the Paris Agreement are required to submit domestic climate plans detailing their mitigation measures, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs). These plans detail countries’ ambitions and efforts to combat and respond to climate change. NDCs are communicated at five-year intervals, and each successive NDC must represent an increase in ambition over the previous one.

Can voluntary carbon emission reduction pledges, such as the nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement, result in significant emission reductions? According to prominent experts such as Nordhaus (2015), Barrett (2005), and Weitzman (2019), free-riding is unavoidable in cooperative situations based on voluntary agreements. If their assessments are correct, each country’s nationally determined contribution is unreliable. Countries will strategically promise large cuts while making only minor emission reductions.

The energy transition toward decarbonization is expected to impact producers of fossil fuels. However, oil-exporting countries are currently key players in the modern economy. Thus, the energy transition will not be successful if state revenues in these countries are not stably maintained. These countries can protect themselves against revenue volatility and mitigate carbon risk by diversifying their economies. However, export diversification appears to be particularly challenging for many oil-producing countries.

The recognition of the necessity to reduce meat consumption in affluent nations is now widely acknowledged. A large body of literature examines the personal factors that lead to meat reduction or avoidance, including the motivations and profiles of individuals. While excluding meat consumption from ones' diet alone could be challenging, surprisingly, literature has sparsely examined the role of communities supporting this process, which includes both practices and convictions. This research seeks to make up for that and aims to investigate the impact of communities (both imagined and real) on the construction of vegetarian and vegan identities. To this end, nineteen semi-structured interview..

Macroeconomic and sectoral assessment of the energy price reform (EPR) can provide policymakers with useful insights regarding price deregulation options. A key feature of this research that differentiates it from many other studies is its modeling framework. The framework first estimates how theoretically articulated determinants (e.g., income and price) historically shaped natural gas demand. Then, this estimated equation is integrated into a macroeconometric model called KGEMM to simulate the impact of natural gas prices on key macroeconomic and sectoral indicators that are of policy interest for the coming years.

Despite the existence of a legal framework defining the right to fair compensation, and notwithstanding the vast literature on transnational and domestic land deals, no theory has been developed so far to allow for a specific analysis of the economics of fair compensation in large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs), limiting our understanding of the underlying reasons of success or failure of this important legal protection mechanism. Building on the review of the existing literature on fair compensation and on the critical examination of several real-world case studies, this paper fills this gap by developing a three-player sequential game, which captures the peculiarities of fair compensation..

The "Carbon Curse" theory suggests that fossil fuel richness leads countries to have more carbon intensive development trajectories than they would otherwise. Using causal inference for cross-country panel data spanning 1950-2018, we globally estimate the effect of giant oil and gas discoveries on carbon emissions. Our findings show that the effect is sizable and persistent. Countries that discovered large fossil-fuel fields emit roughly 30% more pollution post-discovery than countries without these discoveries. This effect is stronger in developing countries, and is substantial from the date of the first giant discovery. By exploiting the randomness of the timing of discoveries, we provide ..

This paper presents a preliminary assessment of the nature and extent of the financial impact of the mitigation policies centered on deep decarbonization of India's electricity sector on the budget deficits of the states with relatively low endowments of solar and wind power. The impact could be quite substantial, adding 8.66 % to the combined deficits of the VRE poor states under fairly conservative assumptions. The impact is most severe on the three coal-rich states of Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh. Absent an acceptable framework for an equitable sharing of costs and benefits across the states and with the centre, these developments could impede the realization of the national goals f..

We compare alternative methodologies to identify central banks speeches that focus on climate change and argue a supervised word scoring method produces the most comprehensive set. Using these climate-related speeches, we empirically examine the role of the mandate in shaping central bank communication about climate change. Central banks differ considerably in the extent to which their mandates support a sustainability objective -- it can be explicit, indirect whereby the central bank is mandated to support broader government policies, or it may not be supported at all. Our results show that these differences are important in determining the frequency of climate-related communication as well..

The role of climate change on economic performance and output has been studied extensively in the empirical literature, however, its distributional effects have received little attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by investigating whether climate shocks affect income inequality in a large number of countries. We use data on climate indicators, income and inequality measures for 153 countries spanning a long time period. The climate shock is identified as the disturbance that explains the bulk of the climate fluctuations in the long run. Our findings suggest that an adverse climate shock is associated with an increase in measures of income inequality. We find a heterogeneous impact..

Increasing agricultural productivity growth sustainably can help to address the triple challenge of providing sufficient affordable and nutritious food for a growing global population, while supporting sector livelihoods and improving environmental outcomes. However, challenges remain in measuring environmentally sustainable productivity growth. This study uses alternative approaches to address these challenges and provides answers to the following questions: i) has Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth coincided with improved environmental outcomes?; and ii) has the agricultural productivity and environmental performance of countries improved over time? While there is compelling evidence t..

The paper investigates a multi-period supply channel facing uncertain and price-history dependent demands and environmental regulations. The knowledge about the demands is limited to its mean and standard deviation in each period, .e., there is incomplete information on the actual distribution. A distributional robust approach is conducted to address incompleteness. The chain is incorporating environmental policies such as pollution constraints and (optimal) corrective taxes. A single contract covers all periods. Numerical examples highlight the benefits of a single contract.

This paper investigates the long-term impacts of protected area management on the labor market participation and composition of the affected population. We study changes spanning two decades in the Western Ghats region of India, one of the key global biodiversity hotspots with the highest population density. Our findings indicate a noteworthy shift toward non-farm employment. Additionally, our research unveils a marked trend towards irregular income patterns: eco-development initiatives appear to have resulted in a significant decline in year-round employment coupled with a corresponding rise in employment for less than six months a year. The primary mechanism we identify is a distinct chang..

Information can trigger unpleasant emotions. As a result, individuals might be tempted to strategically ignore it. We experimentally investigate whether increasing perceived control can mitigate strategic ignorance. Participants from India were presented with a choice to receive information about the health risk associated with air pollution and were later asked to recall it. Perceived control leads to a substantial improvement in information recall. We find that optimists react most to perceived control, both with a reduction in information avoidance and an increase in information recall. This latter result is supported by a US sample. A theoretical framework rationalizes our findings.

This paper explores food supply chain resilience and its connection to resilience of food systems more broadly. In terms of availability and affordability, food supply chains have been resilient to a wide range of shocks. Trade plays an important risk pooling role in allowing countries to draw on international markets in the face of domestic shocks. Some domestic policies have helped absorb supply chain shocks, for example support to low-income households or the removal of supply chain bottlenecks. Other measures like export restrictions exacerbate instability. The concept of food systems resilience goes further than availability and affordability of food. It includes broader objectives (lik..

The frequency and severity of extreme wildfires are on the rise in Portugal, causing unprecedented disruption and increasingly challenging the country’s capacity to contain losses and damages. These challenges are set to keep growing in the context of climate change, highlighting the need to scale up wildfire prevention and climate change adaptation. This paper provides an overview of Portugal’s wildfire policies and practices and assesses the extent to which wildfire management in the country is evolving to adapt to growing wildfire risk under climate change.

The European Union has committed to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Reaching this objective implies massive changes in the economies of the region. The biggest challenge of this green transition is to make sure that it happens without sacrificing economic progress and guaranteeing justice and inclusiveness. This pledge requires that every country be capable of addressing the trade-offs between the targets while remaining committed towards the common decarbonisation goal. This paper analyses the success with which European countries are carrying out the energy transition. We propose an enhanced hyperbolic distance function and a stochastic frontier analysis approach t..

The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) requires significant resources, which creates a conflict in light of the growing importance of sustainable practices. To address this challenge, it is essential to consider its reusability but the unique nature of AI necessitates the development of specific design principles tailored to AI systems. Thus, we utilize design science research and leverage established design knowledge that encompasses principles for creating AI solutions that can be reused. Our approach incorporates Wenger's (1998) framework of Community of Practice and involves iterative refinement and evaluation of our design knowledge through design thinking workshops, focus g..

Investment in solar generation is essential to achieve EU climate neutrality by 2050. Using stochastic programming, we study the management of solar power plants considering trading in the spot and future markets, weather derivatives based on solar radiation, storage, and risk management. We provide a comparative study of two technologies: a concentrated solar power plant with thermal storage and a photovoltaic power plant with electrical batteries. The significant managerial contributions can be classified into four levels. First, regarding trading and generation decisions, we proved that: a) plants sell energy in the spot market during the night and store energy in the morning; b) storage ..

The effects of deforestation through land fires used by farmers (specially, smallholders) are twofold. From the individual point of view, they prepare the land improving its fertility. On the other side, the aggregate decision has a negative impact on air and water quality, degrading the environment, and this is reverted as a negative impact of the productivity of the land. In this work we present an aggregative game framework which includes those effects and allows us to analyze the impact of cost fires variations and number of farmers. Finally, using data from Brazilian research institutes, we test the sign and the size of the impacts of those determinants on the aggregate deforestation in..

This paper identifies the determinants of OECD Environmental Policy Stringency (EPS) index using a panel of 21 European countries for the period 2009-2019. If there is a large literature on the macroeconomic, political, and social determinants of EPS, the people's attitudes or preferences toward environmental policies is still burgeoning. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to estimate the effects of people's awareness regarding environmental issues on the EPS indicator. Due to the endogeneity of preferences, we have applied an instrumental variable framework to estimate our empirical model. Our most important result is to show that individual environmental preferences have a positive and s..

Heat generation based on conventional fossil fuels is considered to be the cause of a significant proportion of greenhouse gas emissions. Achieving the climate protection goals therefore requires a transition to renewable energy sources such as biomass. Establishing renewable district heating (DH) systems is considered as an important cornerstone of a decarbonized energy system. This study estimates the cost efficiency of biomass-based DH systems. It expands the benchmarking currently used in Austria which relies on simple key performance indicators by a new type of multi-variate approach based on efficiency estimates from Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The performance indicator calculated..

An important yet less studied factor in determining the extent of adaptation to climate change is information: are people adequately informed about their vulnerability to future climate-related risks, and does their willingness to adapt depend on this knowledge? Focusing on how communication about projected sea level rise (SLR) affects the willingness to migrate, we implemented a large randomized control survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of more than 7, 000 respondents across all provinces in Vietnam. We randomly assign respondents to different information treatments. We find that providing a simple text-based information treatment about the general extent of Vietnam'..

In this paper, we investigate the impact of adverse weather shocks on Colombian economic activity, with a particular emphasis on the effects on agricultural output, food and headline inflation. Existing literature and empirical evidence suggest that adverse weather shocks, such as those related to the El Nino event in 2015-2016, lead to decreases in agricultural output and increases in inflation without significantly affecting total GDP growth. To further assess this result, we evaluate the impact of ENSO fluctuations using a BVAR-X model. Based on these findings, we propose a small open economy New Keynesian model that introduces a novel channel through which relative prices (agricultural v..

Flooding is expected to increase in the future as the effects of climate change increase. CBO examines how projected flood risk varies in two multiyear projection periods, one centered on 2020 and the other centered on 2050.

The regulation of gears constitutes a fisheries management strategy primarily aimed at preserving immature fish. This approach circumvents the politically sensitive and difficult-to-enforce direct restrictions on entry and catches that characterize many developing contexts. However, existing recommendations often oversimplify socioeconomic dimensions and assume complete government control over gear selection. This oversimplification overlooks crucial effects resulting from the fishers’ agency. To address this gap, our study highlights the implications of fishing gear selection in the outcomes of a fishery. We propose that the choice of fishing gear, i.e., the ability of fishers to select f..

This paper investigates price volatility and spillover effects in the Nordic electricity wholesale markets, comprising Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway. Utilizing both the Time-Varying Parameter Vector Autoregressive (TVP-VAR) and Rolling Window-based VAR (RW-VAR) approaches, we analyze the integration dynamics among these regional markets and the impact of carbon prices on volatility spillovers. The study employs a rich dataset of 107, 352 hourly prices spanning from January 2010 to March 2022. The novelty of this research is three-fold. Firstly, we adopt a connectedness approach to explore volatility interactions among the four Nordic markets, contributing to the scarce literature on v..

The shipping industry is essential for international trade, but it is also an important source of CO2 emissions. To make progress towards climate targets, countries need to monitor CO2 emissions from vessels owned by their ship operator companies. However, most shipping activity takes place outside national borders, making it more difficult to monitor than activity taking place within countries. The OECD’s experimental database on OECD.stat provides a new source of data for CO2 emissions from global shipping, which is available monthly in near real time. This data will help national statistics producers to compile their Air Emission Accounts (AEAs) for the System of Environmental Economic ..