Conference Agenda

This paper introduces a CGE–GIS framework that integrates the GEMINI-E3 model with EU NUTS-2 regional emissions data. It enables spatially refined analysis of climate policies, capturing regional disparities in decarbonization and mitigation costs under the Fit for 55 package. Results identify five distinct regional pathways shaped by demographics, growth, and carbon intensity. ETS-2 shows higher carbon prices than ETS, and emissions trading under the ESR causes uneven welfare effects—gains in Eastern Europe, losses in wealthier states. Despite modest EU-wide costs, regional differences are significant. The framework supports equitable, efficient climate policy tailored to Europe’s socio-economic and geographic diversity.

International climate cooperation remains challenging as countries differ widely in their economic and spatial structures, which creates uneven incentives to mitigate emissions. Since trade already reflects these geographic differences, it offers a natural lever for climate cooperation. Focusing on the agricultural sector, this paper develops a general equilibrium model that incorporates spatial and structural features in an open economy and couples it with a simultaneous-move climate club formation game. The objective is to study whether trade liberalization can foster climate coalition formation without generating unintended consequences. Calibrating the model to real-world data, we simulate multiple coalition formation scenarios reflecting alternative behavioral responses by countries. The results show that agricultural trade liberalization can effectively incentivize countries to join a stable climate coalition, yielding significant global greenhouse gas emission reductions and welfare gains. However, these benefits may come with important trade-offs. Agricultural trade incentives directly interact with food consumption patterns and both the intensive and extensive margins of production. Examining the broader climate and socio-economic effects, we find that the resulting coalitions may increase livestock-related emissions, exacerbate food security imbalances, and intensify land-use change emissions, particularly in tropical regions.

One of the most direct and consequential effects of climate change is an increase in human exposure to heat stress, with large adverse consequences for labor

productivity, as workers need to take more breaks or work at lower intensity. However, comprehensive assessment of the global, economy-wide costs of these productivity effects is largely missing, including from important policy-relevant metrics such as the social cost of carbon (SCC). This paper estimates the labor productivity impacts of heat stress at $65 per ton CO2 in 2020 (90% confidence interval $3 - 161) under a 2% near term discount rate. This estimate is based on work-place heat-stress standards, bias-corrected projections of heat stress from the CMIP6 ensemble, general equilibrium modeling to account for adaptive economic responses, and integration into a cutting-edge integrated assessment framework. Losses are geographically heterogenous, with a high concentration in South Asia and, to a lesser extent, in East and Southeast Asia and Africa. We also present a revised agriculture sector damage function based on new evidence from IPCC AR6. The combined effect of the new labor and agriculture damages on the expected value of the 2020 SCC is a modest increase from $185 per ton CO2 to $192 per ton, but also a substantial reduction in uncertainty (90% confidence interval falls from $45-$425 to $74-369, a more than 20% contraction), likely due to more precise estimates of the climate change impact on crop yields.

Climate change is increasing the frequency of abnormally hot nights (tropical nights), which, absent adaptation, disrupt sleep and impair cognitive functioning and attention. I examine the impact of tropical nights on the risk of commuting road accidents, exploiting variation in short-term local weather and administrative records covering the universe of such accidents in Spain. I find that the likelihood of a commuting accident rises by 14-15.5% following a tropical night, with the magnitude of the effect varying with local levels of adaptation. The increase in accident risk is disproportionately concentrated among women—with evidence suggesting to gendered patterns of time use and physiological vulnerability as underlying mechanisms—as well as among lower-income individuals. Using station-level climate change projections from 11 global climate models, I estimate the trajectory of accident incidence and quantify the associated injuries, fatalities, and productivity losses in the absence of adaptation measures and flexible work policies.