Conference Agenda

One mandate of the US Environmental Protection Agency is to use its legal authority to promote and ensure environmental justice. This paper investigates to what extent this has been the case in the recent past. Our analysis draws on a comprehensive dataset that links auditing information from all environmentally relevant plants across the USA over 2000 - 2018 to county-level demographic and ethnic yearly information. We study whether changes in the racial composition of US counties are followed by adjustments in the volume of air quality inspections to polluting plants.

We find robust evidence that the share of inspected plants within a county decreases following an increase in the share of the non-White population. This decrease coincides with higher air pollution levels and an increased rate of nonattainment designations. Furthermore, we show that political power, measured in the amount of political donations and organized protests, declines after the demographic shift.

Using a text-mining approach applied to task descriptions of occupations together with worker-level administrative data, we explore the growth in the greenness of employment which amounted to 35% between 2012 and 2022. We first demonstrate that the general greening of occupations (“within-effect”) accounts for two thirds of the overall greening of employment, whereas shifting occupational employment shares (“between-effect”) account for the remainder. Second, we show which occupations contribute most to the within-effect. Third, we provide evidence which worker flows are mainly responsible for the between-effect, and which socio-demographic groups drive these labour-market transitions.

The association between weather anomalies, such as rising temperatures and rainfall shocks, and child malnutrition is well established. By impacting food availability, access, and utilization, climate variability contributes to several of the underlying causes of child undernutrition. In light of the pivotal role women can play in the allocation of resources within households, this study explores whether higher levels of women's empowerment can help mitigate the adverse effects of high temperatures on children’s nutritional well-being. We use the SWPER indicator, which permits to account for the multidimensional nature of women's empowerment, and a large panel of sub-Saharan African countries that we follow over several years. We find that women with a higher level of empowerment, as primarily captured by a greater participation in important household decisions, can be instrumental in preventing acute malnutrition in children during periods of extreme heat. This effect appears to be especially pronounced amongst children with the lowest nutritional levels. Strategic decisions pertaining to the allocation of resources - such as food, money, time, and care - are likely to play a particularly crucial role in protecting the nutrition of the most vulnerable children in the event of a shock.

Using nationally representative time-use data from India, this paper investigates the impact of daily temperature on intra-household gender-specific time allocation across broad activity groups in India. Analyzing individual-level time-use information merged with district-level daily temperature data, we find that men spend more time on paid work during higher temperature bins compared to moderate temperature bins. In contrast, women reduce their time allocation to paid work under higher temperature conditions. This results in a 22-minute widening of the gender gap in paid work, thereby intensifying the pre-existing disparity. Additionally, women increase their self-care time by 11 minutes at higher temperature bins compared to moderate temperature bins. Furthermore, we identify an amplified gender gap in favor of females for learning activities at higher temperature bins, contributing to a reduction in the gender gap in learning. Heterogeneity analysis indicates a widening gender gap in paid work for married individuals, urban residents, and indoor workers at higher temperatures. Gender differentials for married increase for self-care during higher temperatures, while unmarried females bear a greater household burden in warmer conditions.