UCLA

The extent to which climate change will exacerbate already growing inequality, both across and within locations, is an open question. The power that people have, or lack, to adapt to a warming climate is central to this issue. This dissertation includes three studies on potential climate adaptations. In the first, my coauthors and I study whether heat-induced use of energy-intensive adaptation technologies, such as air conditioning, can lead to financial distress. We test for this possibility with data from California on electricity use and disconnections, a consequence of utility bill non-payment. We find that hot weather increases electricity expenses in the current billing period and the relative risk of disconnection 51 to 75 days later. In the second study, my coauthors and I examine the impact of temperature-related crop losses on household diets in rural India, a setting with a high prevalence of small family farms. High temperatures during the growing season reduce crop yields, but it is unclear how these losses affect household diets. While we find no significant impact of heat on average calorie or iron consumption in the subsequent year, the number of extremely malnourished households increases. We also find suggestive evidence that households adapt to heat-induced losses of home-grown calories by purchasing more food, which helps to explain the lack of aggregate impacts. In the third study, I analyze worker responses to climate change. Past work in this area has largely focused on the on-the-job effects of extreme weather on environmentally exposed workers and potential short-term adaptations. Little is known about long-term adaptations, such as changing occupations. Well-documented challenges to occupational mobility, especially between occupations with different task requirements, suggest that this adaptation strategy may be prohibitively costly for many workers. Using individual-level panel data from France, I find that historically, inter-exposure mobility rates are low. The task composition of high exposure jobs provides a partial, but incomplete, explanation for this labor market segmentation.