Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Belief Formation and Adaptation to Climate Change

经济学博士论文研究：信念的形成与气候变化的适应

• 批准号: 2242263
• 负责人: Gautam Rao
• 金额: $ 2.5万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-02-01 至 2024-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2242263&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Economics; Belief

Climate change poses an existential crisis to hundreds of millions of the world’s poor, threatening both their livelihoods and lives. These households—often out of reach of government support—must take steps themselves to address the dramatic shifts already occurring in their local environments. Appropriate reaction therefore relies not only on access to the right tools to respond to the harmful effects of global warming but also on the knowledge to implement these measures in the first place. Yet several characteristic features of climate change, such as the small, incremental steps through which the environment evolves, make learning in this domain particularly challenging. This research project will explore these frictions to belief formation using new survey data among farmers in rural areas and test the extent to which they inhibit people's capacity to adjust to the environmental changes around them. Using an experiment correcting farmers’ beliefs about the harmful consequences of global warming on their own plots, this project will evaluate the scope for a low-cost policy to improve technological adaptation. The results of this project will contribute to our understanding of how individuals adapt to climate change, and the new datasets measuring both beliefs and the incidence of environmental shocks will be made freely available to other researchers.This project will delve into farmers’ underlying mental models to understand how these households update about decision-relevant features of their local environment that have been impacted by global warming. Increased soil salinity threatens to dramatically reduce crop production without shifts in irrigation techniques and seed choice. Like with many dimensions of climate change, learning about rising soil salinity presents significant challenges: the underlying causal process is opaque (impacted by rising sea levels, depleting groundwater reserves, and increasing flooding) and changes often happen incrementally embedded in seasonal patterns. Economic theories of limited attention suggest that small shifts will remain neglected, generating mistaken underestimation of true salt levels. This project will elicit quantitative beliefs among farmers about salinity on their plots to provide direct measurement of expectations about their local environment. Using natural experiments in salt levels due to the interaction of flooding and water salinity calculated using recent advances in remote sensing, this project will test mental models of belief formation by assessing which signals trigger updating by farmers. By randomly providing information based on direct soil salinity measurements from farmers’ own plots, this project will measure the elasticity of technological adoption with respect to beliefs, providing an evaluation of a low-cost policy to improve adaptation to climate change.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

气候变化将现有的危机定位给数亿美元的世界贫困人口，威胁着他们的生计和生命。这些家庭（通常是出于政府支持的范围）必须采取步骤来解决其当地环境中已经发生的急剧转变。因此，适当的反应不仅依赖于使用正确的工具来应对全球变暖的有害影响，而且还依赖于最初实施这些措施的知识。然而，气候变化的一些特征，例如环境发展的小小的增量步骤，使该领域的学习尤其挑战。该研究项目将探索这些摩擦，以相信使用粗糙地区的农民之间的新调查数据来相信形成，并测试他们抑制人们适应周围环境变化的能力的程度。使用实验纠正农民对全球变暖对自己的土地的有害后果的信念，该项目将评估低成本政策的范围，以改善技术适应性。该项目的结果将有助于我们对个人如何适应气候变化的理解，以及衡量信念和环境冲击事件的新数据集将使其他研究人员免费获得。该项目将深入探讨农民的基本心理模型，以了解这些家庭如何更新这些家庭对全球温暖的当地环境的更新。土壤盐度威胁会大大减少农作物的产量，而不会改变灌溉技术和种子选择。就像随着气候变化的许多维度一样，了解土壤盐度的增长也会带来重大挑战：潜在的灾难性过程是不透明的（受海平面上升，耗尽的地下水储备和洪水增加的影响），并且经常发生变化，通常会逐渐嵌入季节性的模式中。有限关注的经济理论表明，小转变将被忽视，从而导致对真正盐水平的错误低估。该项目将在农民中引起对土地上盐的定量信念，以直接衡量对其当地环境的期望。由于使用遥感最新进展计算出的洪水和水盐性相互作用，使用盐水平的自然实验，该项目将通过评估哪些信号触发农民的更新来测试信仰形成的心理模型。通过基于农民自己地块的直接土壤盐分测量的随机提供信息，该项目将衡量对信仰的技术采用弹性，从而评估低成本政策，以改善对气候变化的适应性。该奖项反映了NSF的立法使命，并通过对基金会的知识优点进行评估，并以评估为基础的智力综述和广泛的效果。