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Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events.

Please check our website listings and Twitter feed @STICERD_LSE for updates.

Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public. Please ensure you have informed the event contact as early as possible.

Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.

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About this event

Extreme heat is one of the defining threats to human welfare in the twenty-first century, and its toll falls hardest on the world's most vulnerable workers, who have the least capacity to withstand it. We design and evaluate a fully-subsidized parametric heat-insurance program among nearly 2,000 factory workers in Delhi, randomizing daily wage-equivalent cash transfers (day-of vs. anticipatory), information alerts, and workplace saturation. Day-of cash raises days off by roughly 13%, concentrated among the most heat-exposed workers on the hottest days?allowing us to cleanly separate the labor-supply response from a pure income effect. Effects amplify sharply with coworker saturation as employer resistance declines, revealing bargaining power as a key barrier to adaptation alongside liquidity. Treated workers borrow less, seek more healthcare, and improve their diets. A simple model shows the typical worker is short by nearly two full days' wages of what protection actually costs. Yet willingness to pay for this product is strikingly low, and structural barriers -- covariate risk, an adverse climate trend, basis risk -- mean conventional private markets cannot fill this gap on their own, even though the estimated social returns are 8?18x the fiscal cost. As climate change pushes heat exposure past the limits of individual coping, we argue there is a compelling case for publicly-financed and/or creatively-structured temperature-indexed insurance.