A special thank-you to the editors and referees, whose thoughtful suggestions greatly improved the rigor and clarity of the paper.
🙏 I am deeply grateful for the generous comments, guidance, and feedback from Fernando Aragon, Jane Friesen, Josh Merfeld, Kevin Schnepel, Vis Taraz, Hendrik Wolff, and participants at: EfD 14th Annual Meeting • SEEDS 2020 • 2021 CEA • NAREA 2021 • 2021 CIREQ Climate Change Symposium • LAERE 2025.
3️⃣ No “make-up” effect.
Workers do not compensate for lost hours in subsequent weeks. Heat leads to persistent, not temporary, reductions in labor supply.
These findings suggest that climate change will amplify existing inequalities in labor markets across the Global South.
2️⃣ Informal workers are hit hardest.
The reduction in hours is concentrated entirely among informal workers, regardless of whether jobs are indoors or outdoors. This reflects structural vulnerabilities — lower access to cooling, electricity, childcare flexibility, and social protection.
🌡️ What did we find? In simple terms:
1️⃣ Hotter days make people work less.
Every additional day above 27°C reduces weekly hours worked by 0.63 hours (≈40 minutes), even after controlling for relative humidity, rainfall, and daylight.
🔥 Excited to share that my article “Is It Too Hot to Work? Evidence from #Peru” has just been published in #Environment and #Development #Economics!
Link: lnkd.in/e9AU2638
5/
🔍 What explains this?
Our findings suggest 2 key mechanisms:
- A sharp drop in forest monitoring & enforcement
- Expansion of illicit economic activities
4/
💨 The environmental cost?
An additional 8 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions, equivalent to:
– 💵 $220 million in social costs
– 🔥 5× Peru’s annual budget for forest conservation
3/
📈 The relationship is causal:
A 10% increase in COVID-19 cases caused a 1.5% increase in deforestation.
This effect was strongest in areas with illegal mining and coca cultivation, where governance is already fragile.
2/
🌲 Deforestation rose sharply in 2020.
Our data show that COVID-19 accounted for 1/3 of this increase—about 47,000 extra hectares lost.
Why? Institutional capacity for forest protection declined just as illegal activity surged.
1/
Why did deforestation spike during COVID-19 in the Peruvian Amazon?
In our new paper (w/ Jerico Fiestas & Javier Montoya), we find that the pandemic didn’t just threaten health—it fueled environmental degradation too.
Here’s what we found 👇
🚨 New Publication (open access!)
COVID-19 triggered a surge in deforestation across the Peruvian Amazon.
🦠+10% COVID-19 cases → 🌲 +1.5% deforestation
🌍+8M tons of CO₂
💸$220M in social costs (5× forest budget)
💰Impact amplified by illegal mining & coca
🔗 doi.org/10.1016/j.tf...
Thrilled to share 3ie’s new resource for development practitioners who want to leverage remote sensing to evaluate and strengthen programming with #Geo4Dev #CEGA + #NewLightTech
Read how you can leverage this tool: www.3ieimpact.org/blogs/explor...
Explore the resource: rsindex.softr.app
Presenting the canonical spatial model and then exploring it through the lens of development economics, pointing out the "on-the-ground" facts of missing markets, frictions, and context-specific parameters, from Gharad T. Bryan, Kyra Frye, and Melanie Morten https://www.nber.org/papers/w33453
1/🚨New chapter in Handbook of Regional & Urban Economics: Spatial Environmental Economics
🌍 How do spatial forces affect the environment? How does enviro shape spatial outcomes?
Thread, chapter explore this nascent subfield via stylized acts, models, building blocks for rsrch. w Clare Balboni.
Join us at the International Transportation Economics Association Annual Conference & School at Northwestern University, June 23-27, 2025! Featuring keynote speaker Prof. Dave Donaldson (MIT). Submit your transportation economics research by Feb 28. Two paper prizes available!
Planning your climate or environment syllabus? I like to show short videos so students & I can visualize some of the things we're talking about. Here are some of the ones I like:
Here are the first five sets of slides:
01 Introduction: psantanna.com/DiD/01_Intro...
02 Classical 2x2 setup: psantanna.com/DiD/02_two_b...
03 Clustering issues: psantanna.com/DiD/03_Clust...
04 Functional form: psantanna.com/DiD/04_Funct...
05 Covariates: psantanna.com/DiD/05_Covar...
After years work assembling and organizing it, together with Bruno Calderón, John Marshall and José Luis Perez Castellanos, we present you the "Electoral precinct-level database for Mexican municipal elections" osf.io/6jteh/ dropbox.com/scl/fi/3kqnb...
I'm revising the abstract of one of my papers, so naturally I'm re-reading my evidence-based post on how to write an abstract. www.cgdev.org/blog/how-wri...
Thrilled that our papers have been accepted to the first LAERE Congress! :) Vamos 🇨🇴!
* Please Share *
We are hiring a full-time two-year RA! (or pre-doc?). Very excited about this position because you could be paired to work with many awesome economists at Batten (Ben Castleman, Andrew Simon, Derek Wu, Tim Layton) and myself!
More info down here 👇
jobs.virginia.edu/us/en/job/R0...
Please suggest succinct resources for guiding students through defining a good research question in the social sciences
eg advice like…
-Has a question mark at end
-Is falsifiable
-is feasible
#Econsky 🚨We are hiring!🚨
Job post: akadeus.com/announcement...
How should you deal with journal rejections? Some suggestions below.
Hopefully, if you made it this far, you appreciate bats a bit more than you did a few minutes ago.
I'm not in the teaching game anymore, but Quarto Live looks like a fantastic innovation in this space. Write your lecture notes per normal... but with embedded R/Py code that runs fully in-browser. Students can follow along on their iPads etc. No local install required. r-wasm.github.io/quarto-live/
A few weeks ago, I spoke on a panel about publishing at the CSWEP’s CeMENT workshop. I wanted to briefly share some of that advice here.
