EEE-Hour

Thursday 12 November 2026 16:00 - 17:00

Mini Conference in Innovation

SAL 1.04, 1st Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

Thursday 05 November 2026 16:00 - 17:00

Introduction session

SAL 1.04, 1st Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

Thursday 02 April 2026 16:00 - 17:00

Salting the Earth: Shrimp Farming and Agricultural Externalities in Bangladesh

Bangladesh is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the word. Even under optimistic assumptions for the path of climate change, scientists predict large decreases in crop yields and the potential for high rates of out-migration from rural areas. In the face of rising groundwater salinity, one adaptation method to the changing local climate is switching from agriculture to aquaculture, that is raising shrimp and fish which thrive in brackish water. We show that farmers believe shrimp farming causes local externalities, and lead to greater adoption of shrimp farming on nearby plots using satellite evidence from 80,000 plots and a 1,400 plot ground truth survey. We discuss next steps to show whether this method creates over/under adoption of the new technology.

Jack Thiemel (Department of Economics, LSE)

SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

Thursday 26 March 2026 12:00 - 13:00

Job market paper

Direct Damage, Indirect Costs, and the Design of Disaster Relief

After disasters, aid and insurance payouts target physical damages. But if flooded households commute, borrow and trade, the costs of the disaster are shared with unflooded areas. These spillover effects are overlooked by standard disaster response. We study these effects using panel data on 5,100 households affected by Pakistan's large-scale 2022 floods. We separately estimate the effects of local and regional flooding on household welfare using a recentered IV approach (Boruysak and Hull, 2023) where we control for expected exposure to flooding using a hydrological model of Pakistan. Our results seem to suggest that flooding in the surrounding area predominantly drive the medium-term welfare consequences of disasters, rather than one's own flooding per se. Conditional on regional exposure, directly flooded households receive more aid, commute further for work, and maintain consumption in both survey years. By contrast, regionally flooded households receive less aid - consistent with zero-sum allocation of a fixed budget - face large reductions in agricultural employment, and by year two are drawing down savings, taking on new debt, skipping meals, and reporting worse physical and mental health. To disentangle the true cost of the disaster with endogenous aid response, we develop a spatial general equilibrium model of flooding and relief, which will allow us to back out the causal impact of flooding and simulate optimal relief policy in the presence of indirect effects.

Pol Simpson (LSE), joint with Amen Jalal

SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH