Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
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Thematic Session: Climate Change and Human Capital
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Climate change is altering the environments in which human capital is accumulated and utilized, with implications that span from early-life learning and skill formation to adult health, safety, and labor productivity. This thematic session will assemble empirical contributions that examine how climate shocks and climate policy affect educational outcomes, worker health and safety, the productivity of labor across sectors, and mortality. A particular focus will be on how institutions, technology, and policy affect realized impacts, including potential adaptation responses, as well as on distributional implications, including heterogeneous effects by income, region, and occupation. | ||
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Air Pollution Burden Around the World: Distributions, Inequalities, and the Economic Benefits of Clean Air 1University of Pennsylvania, United States of America; 2University of Houston, United States of America; 3University of Pennsylvania, United States of America; 4University of Pennsylvania, United States of America; 5University of Pennsylvania, United States of America We construct a globally harmonized, high-resolution dataset combining satellite-based aerosol optical depth (AOD) and population data to document global inequalities in air pollution exposure. By weighting pollution by population shares, we provide one of the first comprehensive assessments of how exposure to air pollution by aerosols varies across and within countries and regions. We find large disparities: populations in Asia face average exposure levels more than three times higher than those in Oceania, and within-country inequalities reach up to 359%. We add Subnational GDP information to our datasets to investigate the overlap between air pollution and income inequality. Our global analysis reveals compounding inequalities—regions with higher pollution are also poorer, but this pattern differs across continents. Finally, we provide the first Global Compensating Equivalent Variation (CEV) estimate for clean air, finding that welfare gains from cleaner air varies substantially within countries, underscoring the significant variability on economic and social returns from targeted pollution abatement policies. Worker Incentives and Occupational Safety in Trucking University of Pennsylvania, United States of America We provide evidence that truck drivers' incentives moderate the relationship between extreme weather events and truck crashes. Using data on 1.4 million truck accidents across the continental United States, we first show that weather shocks increase crash risk. Icy conditions increase same day truck accident risk by 118 percent, an effect that is twice as large as that for all-vehicle accidents. We then test the effect of an electronic monitoring mandate, which increased the incentive for unsafe driving, on the ice-crash relationship. Leveraging the fact that several large trucking firms had implemented electronic monitoring prior to the mandate, we estimate a triple difference model and find that the mandate resulted in a 22 percent higher impact of ice on crashes. These findings suggest that considering workers' incentives is important to designing policies that intend to minimize occupational hazards. | ||