"Climate Change, Farm Size and Agricultural Productivity: A Quantitative Analysis with Micro data"

Abstract: I study the impact of climate change on farm size and agricultural productivity in developing countries. I combine pixel-level climate data from the Global Agro-Ecological Zones (GAEZ) project with rich household-level data on agricultural production from the World Bank’s LSMS for Uganda. The GAEZ data provide potential yields by crop for current and given future climatic scenarios predicted by meteorologists. I assess the implications of anticipated climate change on aggregate productivity through the lens of a two-sector model with endogenous farm size and crop choice, featuring heterogeneity in both land quality and farmer ability. Calibrating the model to current conditions, I disentangle farmer ability from land quality at the farm-level. Feeding in crop-level potential yields for the projected climate change to the year 2050, I find that agricultural productivity would increase 23% and farm size would increase 27%, with a switch towards food crops. While the direct effect of climate change accounts for half of these changes, the other half is due to the indirect effects on structural change induced by the climate shock. The effect of climate change however is not uniform within Uganda, implying a widening of regional productivity differences.

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"Sources of Innovation: A Quantitative Analysis with Korean Data"

Abstract: Where does the product innovation come from? from entering plants or incumbents? from existing products or brand new products? To answer this question brought up in "How destructive is innovation" by Garcia-Macia, Hsieh and Klenow (2019) (henceforth, GHK), I quantify the sources of innovation in South Korea over the years 2001-2011, into creative destruction by entrants and incumbents, new varieties by entrants and incumbents, and improvements of existing varieties by incumbents.  To account for the sources of innovation, I combine unique Korean data on the universe of non-farm private sector establishments and the growth framework of GHK (2019), which infers the sources of innovation from job creation and job reallocation flows among incumbent and entrant firms. I find that over 4/5 of the innovation in Korea is accounted for by incumbents, and in particular through their own variety improvements. Comparing the results in South Korea to the United States, I find that the innovation by incumbents is also the dominant source of innovation in the United States but of smaller overall magnitude (2/3). Among entrants, most of the innovation comes through creative destruction in Korea, while through new varieties in the US.

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"Changing Wealth of Nations 2024, Revisiting the Measurement of Comprehensive Wealth"

Preface: Gross domestic product (GDP) is widely recognized as an insufficient measure of economic progress and national “success.” Since GDP is nearly universally available and comparable across countries, it is extensively used as a benchmarking and reference statistic—even for purposes for which it was not designed. GDP measures the level of domestic productive activity, but it ignores the costs of this growth in terms of the environmental degradation that occurs in the process of production, for example. Sir Partha Dasgupta likened this to a soccer team that only measures success as goals for and ignores goals against. Whether economic progress is sustainable can be measured by how real wealth per capita is changing, as this represents changes in future production (and ultimately consumption) opportunities. Wealth in this context encompasses the value of all the assets of a nation that support economic production, such as its factories and roads (produced capital), forests, fish stocks, and fossil fuel reserves (natural capital), labor force (human capital), and net foreign assets. As long as real wealth per capita does not decline, future generations will have at least the same opportunities as the current generation, suggesting that development may be sustainable. All countries produce GDP estimates, but few measure wealth. The World Bank’s The Changing Wealth of Nations (CWON) program addresses this gap. The CWON program is one of the pioneering efforts in measuring wealth, producing the most comprehensive, publicly accessible, and reproducible wealth database currently available. These monetary estimates draw on internationally endorsed concepts and valuation principles from the System of National Accounts and System of Environmental Economic Accounting. This ensures that CWON’s wealth measure is methodologically rigorous and comparable to other metrics of economic progress like GDP.

"Climate Change and the Distribution of Agricultural Production across Space"

"Deforestation and Social Exclusion: Evidence from a global analysis"

"The Fragility and Resilience of Nations: Empirical Analysis"