Conference Agenda

This paper studies the global impact of climate change effects on ports and its consequences on international trade, in the context of the shipping network. Leveraging detailed shipping and weather data, I estimate how sea weather shocks affect ports efficiency and transportation costs. I then include this effect in a model of international trade with a shipping network, featuring port congestion. This model can be used to estimate counterfactuals with climate change projections of sea weather: given the spatially heterogeneous evolution of weather shocks, I can quantify the global effects of climate change on transportation and trade through the port channel, as well as their spatial distribution.

This paper examines the impact of extreme weather events on global supply chains through disruptions to trade infrastructure in a context of climate change. Leveraging high-frequency administrative data covering the quasi-universe of firm-to-firm maritime shipments from the US and Brazil, I study the impact of tropical cyclones on US port operations and firm-level responses. These weather events temporarily disrupt port activities, prompting firms to reduce trade volumes without significantly terminating relationships. Firms however demonstrate persistent adjustments in route choices, even after ports resume normal operations. To evaluate the general equilibrium implications of these transportation-related weather disruptions, I develop a quantitative model of spatial production networks with endogenous trade costs and traffic congestion. Once taken to the data, the model will serve to quantify spatial reallocation of economic activity induced by increasing climate risks to the transportation network, and the effectiveness of port-level infrastructure policy.

This paper examines the impact of temperature shocks, measured by cold and heat waves, on labour market outcomes across 14 European countries. Using retrospective individual level data from the Survey on Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and daily climate data from the E-OBS dataset, we analyze the effect on wages and occupational transition. By leveraging plausibly exogenous weather shocks, we find that heat waves significantly reduce individual income, with losses accumulating over time. Moreover, our analysis documents that older individuals, those with severe health conditions, and workers in heat-exposed occupations experience particularly large income reductions. Losses are also more pronounced in Mediterranean and Eastern European countries, as well as in regions with less regulated wage-setting mechanisms. Additionally, our findings suggest that heat waves increase the likelihood of changing jobs and in particular to transition from heat-exposed to non-heat-exposed occupations. These results underscore the need for targeted policy interventions to mitigate economic losses and protect vulnerable workers in the face of increasing climate variability.

Countries respond differently to climate change and while this resulting behavioral heterogeneity is empirically observed, its relationship to the evolution of global climate action has not been analysed. This paper fills this gap by developing a novel integrated assessment international political economy model (IPE-IAM). Our model shows the possibility of a number of outcomes, where high levels of sustained global action is only one possibility. We show that the model fits the observed increase in global climate action from 1989 to today, however, given estimated parameters, the expected trajectory to 2050 is that global climate action will not continue to rise and net zero will not be reached. In order to achieve a high level of sustained global action, a low degree of heterogeneity regarding countries' preferences for action and a strong peer pressure effect is required.