Essays on Inequality and the Environmen

虽然气候变化加剧了天气事件，自然资源枯竭损害了生物多样性，但关于环境影响的经济后果的文献仍然相对稀少，量化这些影响在不同人群中的差异的研究就更少了，尽管有大量迹象表明环境脆弱性具有很强的异质性。在我提议的研究中，我想通过调查环境不平等的不同方面来填补这一空白，即收入阶层、地区和世代之间的不平等（可能延伸到性别）。我建议在第一章中采用一种包含空间要素的应用微观计量经济学方法，重点是量化过去几十年来当地环境对个人收入分布的不同分位数的影响。对生产力和当地经济的直接影响以及通过移徙产生的间接影响将予以量化。研究结果将表明环境影响和由此产生的移民流动在多大程度上影响收入水平和不平等。第二章通过一个跨期博弈环境揭示了代际不平等，在这个博弈环境中，选民在每一个时间点上都在“环境保护”和“经济增长”之间做出选择，同时考虑到他们余生的预期效用和不确定性。本章将主要依赖于理论微观经济学概念，并有一个应用部分来检验研究结果。鉴于上述情况，“经验微观经济学”研究小组将是最适合我的方法，由莫哈德斯博士在环境经济学的专业知识支持。我还希望向“微观经济理论”和“计量经济学”研究小组的学者学习，以确保我的研究在经济学的各个领域都是严谨和稳健的。

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 onquantifying 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. Giventhe 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.