Energy Economics and Finance Seminar
Speaker
Location
Huntsman Hall – Room JMHH G90
3730 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Event Summary
The seminar series in Energy Economics & Finance (EEF) is jointly organized by Wharton’s Business Economics and Public Policy Department, the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, and Wharton’s Business, Climate and Environment Lab. The scope of the seminar includes regulation and policy papers. The scope of the seminar also includes environmental and transportation issues, as long as there is a connection with energy. Sessions are biweekly on Mondays from 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
For Fall 2021, the seminar will be a combination of in-person and virtual talks. In-person talks will be held at JMHH G90 while virtual ones will meet via Zoom. Meeting links and passcodes for virtual talks are required in order to join and will be included in the emailed meeting announcement prior to each session.
Find and add a Google Calendar version of the schedule on the BEPP seminar page.
To sign up for the seminar, please send your name, email, and affiliation to Dhivya Kaushik: dhivya@wharton.upenn.edu
Talk Title: Climate Change, The Food Problem, and the Challenge of Adaptation through Sectoral Reallocation
Abstract: This paper combines local temperature treatment effects with a quantitative macroeconomic model to assess the potential for global reallocation between agricultural and non-agricultural production to reduce the costs of climate change. First, I use firm-level panel data from a wide range of countries to show that extreme heat reduces productivity less in manufacturing and services than in agriculture, implying that hot countries could achieve large potential gains by adapting to climate change through increasing imports of food and shifting labor toward manufacturing. To investigate the likelihood that such gains will be realized, I embed the empirically estimated productivity effects in a model of sectoral specialization and trade covering 158 countries. Simulations suggest that climate change does little to alter the geography of agricultural production, however, as high trade barriers in developing countries temper the influence of shifting comparative advantage. Instead, climate change accentuates the existing pattern, known as “the food problem,” in which poor countries specialize heavily in relatively low productivity agricultural production to meet subsistence consumer needs. The productivity effects of climate change reduce welfare by 6-10% for the poorest quartile of the world with existing trade barriers, but by 70% less in an alternative policy counterfactual that moves low-income countries to OECD levels of trade openness.
Ishan Nath
Fall 2021 Seminar Schedule
- 9/27: Ishan Nath, Princeton University
- 10/11: Tina Andarge, UMass-Amherst
- 10/18: Lucas Davis, UC-Berkeley
- 10/25: Francisco Costa, University of Delaware
- 11/8: Paige Weber, UNC-Chapel Hill
- 11/15: Sam Stolper, University of Michigan