Working Papers

This paper investigates the consequences of inequality in heat adaptation, examining the effectiveness of alternative cooling technologies in mitigating mortality associated with extreme heat in India for the period 2014-2019. Our empirical results highlight a critical trade-off in heat adaptation. Air conditioning is highly effective in moderating heat-related mortality, but it is expensive, with generally low ownership that tends to be restricted to high-income cities. Conversely, many Indian households, including low-income ones, purchase evaporative coolers, which are much cheaper but do not robustly mitigate the adverse health consequences of humid heat. We show that coolers' limited effectiveness is due to their inability to operate in the humid ambient conditions that prevail over the Indian subcontinent for much of the year, and the small amount of indoor temperature reduction they provide.

This paper examines the role of positive income shocks in helping workers adapt to extreme temperatures. We use daily temperature variations alongside the exogenous implementation of a wage and fiscal policy in Mexican municipalities along the US border to show that increased disposable income significantly reduces temperature-related mortality in treated areas. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that income gains increase households' adaptive capacity, particularly through higher electricity expenditures and the purchase of electric heaters. Our findings provide causal estimates of how income influences the marginal effect of temperature on mortality and contribute to the debate on the effectiveness of climate-related redistribution policies.

Higher temperatures can increase substance abuse and exacerbate its physiological effects, raising the risk of violent behavior. Combining daily administrative crime records and temperatures in the United States, we use a triple difference approach to study how the temperature-crime relationship changed around the 2010 abuse-deterrent reformulation of the prescription opioid OxyContin across counties with varying pre-policy opioid exposure. We find that the reformulation moderated the temperature response of violent crimes. We then monetize the social benefits for avoided temperature-induced violent crimes and argue that standard welfare evaluations of substance abuse regulation understate its social value in a warming climate.

In 2004, Italy introduced a national program to address heat-related health risks through public awareness campaigns, heatwave warning systems, and hospital protocols. Leveraging administrative mortality data, temperature variations, and the plausibly exogenous timing of the policy's rollout, this paper shows that the program mitigated the mortality impact of extreme heat (days at or above 30 °C) by more than 57%. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that the staggered implementation of the heat wave warning systems contributed to reducing excess mortality on days exceeding 30 °C in treated provinces. We further show that enhancing access to information is essential to achieving these mitigating effects. Our findings underscore the critical role of public adaptation policies that leverage information disclosure on the health risks associated with heat stress.