Research

Climate change threatens agricultural productivity in developing countries, yet evidence on whether farmers successfully adapt remains limited. This paper examines climate adaptation in Indian agriculture using district-level data from 1965-2015. I combine agricultural data from the Inter- national Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) with growing degree days constructed from hourly ERA5 temperature measurements. I estimate short-run climate impacts through panel fixed effects and long-run adaptation through long-differences. The analysis focuses on rice and wheat and examines the role of Green Revolution technologies in moderating temperature damage. Panel estimates show rice loses 9.5 percent of yields per 100 extreme degree days above 33°C while wheat loses 8.9 percent per 100 extreme degree days above 30°C. Long-difference estimates show evidence of adaptation for both crops. Green Revolution adoption explains this pattern. High-yielding rice varieties offset temperature damage, reducing climate sensitivity by 40-60 percent. For wheat, irrigation infrastructure offsets temperature damage while high-yielding varieties show no effect. Climate adaptation operated through crop-specific technological pathways.

This paper investigates the effects of air pollution on physical and mental health outcomes in developing countries, utilizing multi-country data from the WHO's Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE) covering Wave 0 from 2002-2004. The analysis examines health and well-being for adults aged 18 and above across five countries: India, Ghana, Mexico, South Africa, and the Russian Federation. Multi-pollutant exposure data including PM2.5, PM10, SO2, CO, and O3 are obtained from NASA's MERRA-2 reanalysis. To address endogeneity concerns, the study employs thermal inversions as an instrumental variable for air pollution exposure and applies a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression model. The analysis examines impacts on self-rated health, respiratory and cardiovascular conditions, depression and anxiety symptoms, and subjective well-being indicators. This research contributes to the growing literature on environmental health in low- and middle-income countries by providing multi-country causal estimates of pollution's health effects and examining heterogeneity across development contexts and vulnerable populations.

Using the fourth round of the Indian National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4), and subsequently replicating our results using the fifth round (NFHS-5), we document differential child physical growth patterns across caste groups in India, demonstrating that lower caste children are born shorter and grow less quickly than children from higher-caste households. We then show that, in line with work from previous rounds of the NFHS, these differences are largely explainable by observable covariates, particularly maternal characteristics and household wealth variables. Our research also reveals a previously undocumented dynamic, that the influence of these variables changes as children develop and suggests that caste-gaps are the result of multiple mechanisms impacting the child growth process at different stages of development. Using age-disaggregated decomposition methods, we demonstrate that health endowment related variables (e.g. maternal height) largely explain birth length gaps, and that variables related to health investments (e.g. household wealth, health care usage) become increasingly influential as children age. Children from lower caste households thus face two margins generating height gaps as they age: a persistent endowment disparity present from birth, and a post birth investment differential that exacerbates the initial deficit.