@article{Productivity:2011,
      recid = {2011},
      author = {Nath, Ishan Brownell},
      title = {The Food Problem and the Aggregate Productivity  Consequences of Climate Change},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2019-08},
      pages = {259},
      abstract = {This dissertation consists of three chapters. The abstract  for Chapter 1 - the primary paper - is below, along with  the titles of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.

Climate change is  projected to sharply reduce agricultural productivity in  hot developing countries and raise it in temperate regions.  Reallocation of labor across sectors could temper the  aggregate impacts of these changes if hotter regions shift  toward importing food and specializing in manufacturing or  exacerbate them if subsistence food requirements push labor  toward agriculture where its productivity suffers most. I  quantify these effects in two steps. First, I project  changes in global comparative advantage by using firm-level  micro-data from 17 countries covering over half the world's  population to estimate the heterogeneous effect of  temperature on output per worker in manufacturing and  services. I find large effects of extremely hot and cold  temperatures on non-agricultural output per worker, but  treatment effects diminish with income and expectations of  temperature such that the projected impact of climate  change is larger in agriculture than non-agriculture.  Second, I embed my estimates in an open-economy model of  structural transformation that matches moments on  output-per-worker, sectoral specialization, and trade for  158 countries. Simulations suggest that subsistence food  requirements dominate labor reallocation in response to  climate change on average and the global decline in GDP is  12.0% larger, and 52.1% larger for the poorest quartile of  the world, when accounting for sectoral reallocation than  in the counterfactual with fixed sectoral shares. The  aggregate willingness-to-pay to avoid climate change is  1.5-2.7% of annual GDP and 6.2-10.0% for the poorest  quartile. Trade reduces the welfare costs of climate change  relative to autarky by only 7.4% under existing policy, but  by 30.7% overall and by 68.2% for the poorest quartile in  an alternative scenario with reduced trade costs.

Chapter  2: Do Renewable Portfolio Standards Deliver Cost-Effective  Carbon Abatement?

Chapter 3: A Global View of Creative  Destruction},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2011},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2011},
}