Essays on Inequality and the Environmen

While it is well documented that climate change aggravates weather events and that natural resource depletion harms biodiversity, literature on the economic consequences of environmental impacts is still relatively sparse.
Even fewer research has quantified how these effects differ across groups of people, despite plentiful indications that environmental vulnerability is strongly heterogeneous. In my proposed piece of research, I would like to fill this gap by investigating different dimensions of environmental inequality, namely inequality across income strata, regions, and generations (with potential extension to gender). I propose to adopt an applied microeconometric approach with spatial elements for the first chapter, which will focus on
quantifying local environmental impacts on individuals' incomes at various quantiles of the distribution over the past decades. Direct effects on productivity and the local economy as well as indirect effects through migration will be quantified. The results will indicate to what extent environmental impacts and the resulting migratory flows affect income levels and inequality. A second chapter could shed light on intergenerational inequality through an intertemporal game setting, in which voters choose between 'environmental protection' and 'economic growth' at each point in time, taking into account the expected utility and uncertainty derived over the remainder of their lives. This chapter would rely mostly on theoretical microeconomic concepts with an applied section to test the findings. Given
the above, the 'Empirical Microeconomics' research group would be the best fit for me methodologically, supported by Dr Mohaddes' expertise in environmental economics. I also hope to learn from scholars in the 'Microeconomic Theory' and 'Econometrics' research groups to ensure that my research is rigorous and robust across various fields in Economics.