The increased occurrence of extreme weather conditions leading to drought is a key development challenge. This paper studies how these extreme events interact with the political process at the local level using rich administrative data for drought declarations and mayoral elections in Brazil....

Environmental taxes have been discussed as one of the main mechanisms to deal with environmental problems. Nonetheless, instruments of this type have rarely been implemented, and the adoption of new or higher environmental taxes has faced resistance in some countries. The purpose of this work is...

In addition to the morbidity and mortality concerns of outdoor air pollution, studies have shown that air pollution also generates problems for children`s cognitive performance and human capital formation. High concentrations of pollutants can affect children s learning process by exacerbating...

This paper focuses on the question of whether the magnitude of long-established environmentally related taxes (ERT) is related to countries environmental performance. While environmental taxes efficiencies have previously been discussed, those taxes contribution to reducing pollution and...

We examine the long-term impacts of drought on local labor markets in Brazil. Us- ing rainfall data going back over a century, we build contemporaneous and historical drought indices for more than 3,000 local areas, and examine them in conjunction with five waves of population census data...

In this paper we tackle the problems of dimensionality of welfare and that of identifying the multidimensionally poor by first finding the poor using the original space of attributes, and then reducing the welfare space. The starting point is the notion that the ‘poor’ constitutes a group of...

Climate change severely impacts critical facets of human capital across the life cycle. This is particularly alarming as both the frequency and intensity of extreme weather shocks continue to increase, and extremes appear to be the main channel of causality. At the same time, human capital has a...