Conference Agenda

Cool roof technologies, especially cool roof paint, offer a low-cost, easily

scalable, and low-emission alternative to energy-intensive air-conditioning for reducing heat exposure in buildings - an increasingly urgent need in developing countries facing rising temperatures due to climate change. We evaluate the effectiveness of a cool roof intervention - white reflective paint applied to the roofs of government pre-schools (anganwadis) in Thiruvananthapuram district of the Indian state of Kerala—using a randomized controlled trial. The cool roof paint reduces indoor temperatures in treated pre-schools by approximately 1.3 degree Celsius. Staff in treatment pre-schools report significantly lower thermal discomfort. We also find meaningful improvements in children’s cognitive performance, amounting to roughly 6.4% of the baseline mean. The intervention has no detectable effect on children’s attendance. Overall, our findings demonstrate that cool roofs can serve as a practical and scalable adaptation strategy to mitigate heat stress in low-resource educational settings.

Climate change increasingly exposes households to direct damages from climate-induced hazards such as river floods, yet their role in macroeconomic assessments remains largely overlooked. Economic modeling has so far focused predominantly on government-led adaptation and damages to firms, while household losses and autonomous responses are absent from standard CGE frameworks. This paper introduces a fourth channel into the EU-EMS regional CGE model to explicitly capture household-level damages and private adaptation actions. We extend the model to represent household living assets, reconstruction needs, and investments in structural measures such as flood-proofing, using physical damage estimates and microdata on household adaptation costs. Our results show that excluding household-level damages misrepresents long-term economic outcomes, as reconstruction-driven GDP gains mask inefficiencies and resource misallocation. By contrast, proactive household adaptation improves aggregate EU GDP by 0.4% by 2100, corresponding to cumulative gains of €858 billion, though impacts vary substantially across countries and regions. A government-backed loan scheme markedly enhances these benefits by protecting savings and consumption, reversing negative GDP outcomes in more vulnerable economies. We further demonstrate that the timing of household adaptation matters: while immediate action is essential in some countries, delaying by a decade can be economically advantageous elsewhere. Our findings show that private household adaptation is neither marginal nor uniform: its economy-wide consequences depend on regional context, timing, and supportive public policies.

We investigate how circular economy policies - such as increased recycling or reduced waste generation - affect primary (virgin) natural resource use at the macro level. First, we develop an analytical macroeconomic model and show under what conditions recycling improvements backfire by increasing primary material use. To quantify this material rebound effect, we develop a general equilibrium model that tracks both the mass and value of key materials like metal, paper, and plastic. The model features a detailed solid waste management sector and a novel production structure that separates material inputs from other intermediate inputs. We develop a method to calibrate the model to both national accounts and material flow accounts. This enables us to track primary and recycled material inputs. Our simulations indicate that circular economy policies are associated with strong rebound effects, often increasing aggregate primary natural resource use. We discuss how to counteract the rebound effect and design cost-effective circular economy policies.

Climate shocks increasingly disrupt coastal fisheries. Understanding how harvesters adapt can help policymakers assess the resilience of a fishery and a fishing community. This study examines how Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) and associated closure policies affect the U.S. West Coast Dungeness crab fishery, focusing on three adaptation margins: spatial, temporal, and cross fisheries. Using a weekly panel for 42 ports in California, Oregon, and Washington from 2006 to 2021, we estimate a flexible prediction model of fishing participation and revenue and use it to simulate season revenue under alternative closure lengths. We find a rebound effect, where port-level revenues are higher in the period immediately after the closure is lifted than when there was no closure in place. These temporal shifts in effort within a season are the most significant mediating factor. In San Francisco, for example, temporal adaptation adds the equivalent of 16% of open season revenue in a season that begins with a seven-week closure. Spatial movement in response to port-level closures and diversification into other fisheries only moderately offset the losses. Reallocation across fisheries provides limited compensation because non-crab species earn lower returns, and the value of spatial adaptation depends largely on differences in reopening dates across adjacent zones. Together, these results empirically measure the potential economic consequences of climate-driven closures and reveal the net losses that remain even after accounting for adaptive behavior. The findings provide policymakers with a basis for evaluating the impacts of temporary closure decisions due to short-run climate disturbances.