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

气候变化对世界上数亿穷人构成生存危机，威胁到他们的生计和生命。这些家庭往往得不到政府的支持，他们必须自己采取措施来应对当地环境中已经发生的巨大变化。因此，适当的反应不仅依赖于获得应对全球变暖有害影响的正确工具，而且首先依赖于执行这些措施的知识。然而，气候变化的一些特征，如环境演变的小而渐进的步骤，使这一领域的学习特别具有挑战性。本研究项目将利用农村地区农民的新调查数据，探讨这些对信念形成的摩擦，并测试它们在多大程度上抑制了人们适应周围环境变化的能力。该项目将利用一项实验，纠正农民对全球变暖在自己的土地上造成的有害后果的看法，评估改善技术适应的低成本政策的范围。该项目的结果将有助于我们理解个人如何适应气候变化，测量信念和环境冲击发生率的新数据集将免费提供给其他研究人员。该项目将深入研究农民的潜在心理模型，以了解这些家庭如何更新受全球变暖影响的当地环境的决策相关特征。如果不改变灌溉技术和种子选择，土壤盐碱化的增加可能会大大减少作物产量。与气候变化的许多方面一样，了解土壤盐分上升带来了重大挑战：潜在的因果过程是不透明的（受海平面上升，地下水储量枯竭和洪水增加的影响），变化往往以季节性模式递增。注意力有限的经济理论表明，微小的变化将继续被忽视，从而错误地低估了真实的盐含量。该项目将在农民中引发关于其地块盐度的定量信念，以提供对当地环境预期的直接测量。该项目将通过利用遥感技术最新进展计算出的洪水和水的盐度相互作用而对盐分水平进行自然实验，评估哪些信号会触发农民更新信息，从而测试信念形成的心理模型。该项目通过随机提供直接从农民自己的土地测量土壤盐分的信息，测量技术采用的弹性与信念，提供一个低成本的政策，以提高适应气候变化的评估。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，被认为是值得支持的评价，使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

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.