Research
Presentation:
"Exploring Gendered Impacts of Climate Change through Feminist Ecological Economics," REACH Programme, School of Geography and Environment, Oxford University, December 3, 2021.
"Exploring Gendered Impacts of Climate Change through Feminist Ecological Economics," REACH Programme, School of Geography and Environment, Oxford University, December 3, 2021.
Publications:
"Feminist ecological economics: A care-centered approach" with Maria Floro in Sustainable Production and Consumption, Volume 1: Challenges and Development (Ranjula Bali Swain and Susanne Sweet, eds.), Palgrave Macmillan, April 2021. (Preprint version)
Principles of Economics in a Nutshell, with Lorenzo Garbo and Dorene Isenberg. Routledge, April 2020.
"Stakeholders and voluntary climate reduction goals at large U.S. firms: An institutional analysis." The Social Science Journal, 55, 2018, 221-231. (Preprint version)
"Engendering Growth Diagnostics: Examining Constraints to Private Investment and Entrepreneurship," with Leanne Roncolato and Caren Grown, Development Policy Review 35(2), January 2017. (Preprint version)
Works-in-progress:
"Immigration Aversion Under Labor Bargaining," with Riko Rosete.
"Stakeholder Groups and Firms' Corporate Sustainability Decisions," with Ranjula Bali Swain.
"Determinants of Voluntary Environmental Program Membership: The Case of EPA's Climate Leaders."
"Feminist ecological economics: A care-centered approach" with Maria Floro in Sustainable Production and Consumption, Volume 1: Challenges and Development (Ranjula Bali Swain and Susanne Sweet, eds.), Palgrave Macmillan, April 2021. (Preprint version)
- This chapter introduces a comparative assessment of neoclassical, ecological, and feminist of consumption and production from the perspectives of sustainability, their conceptions of well-being, and their treatments of institutions and questions of political economy. It seeks to integrate in the ecological model of the economy, which explicitly considers the relationship between the economic and environmental systems, and the feminist analysis of the relationship between social provisioning and the economic system. The resulting framework builds on the work of feminist ecological economists to incorporate care provisioning into a sustainable economywide model.
Principles of Economics in a Nutshell, with Lorenzo Garbo and Dorene Isenberg. Routledge, April 2020.
- Principles of Economics in a Nutshell provides a succinct overview of contemporary economic theory. This key text introduces economics as a social science, presenting the discipline as an evolving field shaped within an historical context rather than a fixed set of ideas. Chapters on microeconomics introduce concepts of scarcity and tradeoffs, market analysis (the Marshallian cross of supply and demand) and the theory of the firm and market structure. Chapters on macroeconomics begin with an explanation of national income accounting, followed by discussions of macroeconomic theory in the goods market and in the money market from both a Keynesian and Classical view. The text concludes with examples of how to expand upon core material: using the examples of wage discrimination and climate change, it examines these issues from conservative, liberal, and radical perspectives. Each chapter concludes with a set of analytical questions and suggestions for further reading which can be used to augment the text. This book will be of great importance to students new to economics and is ideal for use on single-semester Principles courses or as a primer on economics courses in other settings.
"Stakeholders and voluntary climate reduction goals at large U.S. firms: An institutional analysis." The Social Science Journal, 55, 2018, 221-231. (Preprint version)
- What leads firms to develop voluntary greenhouse gas reduction goals? This paper discusses the results of interviews conducted with vice presidents and managers responsible for environmental sustainability initiatives at large U.S. firms. To situate the analysis, it develops a theoretical framework that sees the firm as a socially embedded creation, where stakeholder groups exert varying levels of influence and provide the context in which the firm responds to outside information in the face of uncertainty. By understanding the firm as socially embedded, the influence and power of groups that have strong preferences for or against environmental protection can be understood. The interviews provide empirical support for this model. Subjects discuss the role of stakeholder groups such as activists, shareholders, consumers, and workers in the development of the firm’s environmental policy. Groups can prompt the firm to set greenhouse gas or energy use reduction goals, and they encourage the firm to reexamine production processes to find new ways to both reduce costs and emissions. This suggests that policies to regulate industrial greenhouse gas emissions may be less costly than some projections indicate.
"Engendering Growth Diagnostics: Examining Constraints to Private Investment and Entrepreneurship," with Leanne Roncolato and Caren Grown, Development Policy Review 35(2), January 2017. (Preprint version)
- The growth constraints diagnostic is a framework that seeks to help countries identify ‘binding’ constraints to private investment and entrepreneurship. Curiously absent from the diagnoses of the 31 countries to which this framework has been applied is any mention of gender gaps. This is surprising given the substantial literature providing evidence that gender gaps in education, income, employment, resource control and access affect economic growth and well-being. This article ‘engenders’ the standard growth diagnostic process through disaggregating key variables by sex, reinterpreting nodes in the decision tree to reflect how they are intrinsically gendered and adding new branches and nodes. It provides a theoretical framework for applying the gender growth diagnostic to help practitioners adopt it in country studies.
Works-in-progress:
"Immigration Aversion Under Labor Bargaining," with Riko Rosete.
- In recent years, immigration issues have become much more politically polarizing in many countries. Literature on the political economy of immigration has typically sought to model preferences for immigration as a function of native worker skill-level and the perceived threat of economic competition from immigrant workers. In this paper, however, we produce a bargaining model of citizen support for or aversion to immigration that draws from work on ethnic conflict to incorporate the idea that workers with poor bargaining power can see community identity “activated” by the prospect of higher levels of immigration. There is a trade-off on a representative citizen’s preference for higher levels of immigration. While more migrant workers can increase productivity and raise the total surplus to be split among workers and capitalists, it may also lower the fallback position of citizen workers. The effect that dominates determines immigration preferences.
"Stakeholder Groups and Firms' Corporate Sustainability Decisions," with Ranjula Bali Swain.
- We develop a novel theoretical framework to explain the mechanism through which firms make decisions on corporate sustainability (CS). CS is modeled as the proportion of clean capital that firms use in their production process. Stakeholder groups such as consumers, communities (activists and non-governmental organizations), regulators, workers and shareholders have preferences for CS, which impact a firm’s profit function and constraints. When firms are confronted with stakeholders who have knowledge about the negative externalities generated by their production, they choose a mix of clean capital to maximize profits given stakeholder constraints. The impact of the stakeholders depends on characteristics such as the size of the firms, market structure, firm’s location, composition of the shareholders, and whether the firm makes a final or intermediate goods. Our framework illuminates why different firms may pursue varying levels of CS action even when they make similar products.
- We explore the relationship between climate change, agricultural adaptation, and gender inequalities in Ethiopia using the second and third waves of the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey conducted in the 2013/14 and 2015/16 growing seasons. While researchers and international organizations have raised concerns about the differential impacts of climate change on men and women, little empirical work has been published on the subject. In what we believe is the first country-level study on women and climate adaptation, we test the hypothesis that farms and agricultural plots controlled by women are less likely engage in adaptation behavior, such as increased irrigation, use of fertilizer, changes in livestock management, and crop switching. Initial results support this hypothesis. The effect is large and significant, and results are robust to several specifications of female control of the farm. We seek to place these results in the context of social norms that have created gendered differences in agricultural production and control in Ethiopia. Additionally, we include household-level data on the long-term climate to understand the effect of changes in rainfall and temperature on adaptation. Understanding these dynamics can lead to a more mindful inclusion of gender issues in climate response plans. The paper ends with a discussion of the kinds of data that could provide additional analysis of these questions, which we hope can be incorporated into future survey waves in Ethiopia and elsewhere.
"Determinants of Voluntary Environmental Program Membership: The Case of EPA's Climate Leaders."
- This paper explores characteristics of firms that joined EPA’s Climate Leaders program through which members set GHG reduction goals between 2002 and 2010, finding that firms engaged in sustainability activities, larger firms, and those located in more environmentally friendly states and states with cleaner air were more likely to join and stay active in the program. To understand which kinds of firms would tend to join such a program, a panel of S&P 500 members is analyzed using a panel probit model that separates between- and within-firm effect and survival analysis, novel approaches to such an analysis in the literature.