Three Essays on Air Pollution in Developing Countries

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Date

2015

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Repository Usage Stats

2109
views
8612
downloads

Abstract

Air pollution is now recognized as the deadliest problem in developing countries and policymakers are pressed to take action to relieve its health burden. Using a variety of econometric strategies, I explore various issues surrounding policies to manage air pollution in developing countries. In the first chapter, using locational equilibrium logic and forest fires as instrument, I estimated the willingness-to-pay for improved PM2.5 in Indonesia. I find that WTP is at around 1% of annual income. Moreover, this approach allows me to compute the welfare effects of a policy that reduces forest fires by 50% in some provinces. The second chapter continues on this theme by assessing the long-term impacts the early-life exposure to air pollution. Using the 1997 forest fires in Indonesia as an exogenous shock, I find that prenatal exposure to air pollution is associated with shorter height, decreased lung capacity, and lower results in cognitive tests. These findings are consistent across several specifications and robustness checks. The last chapter tackles the issue of indoor air pollution in India. In here, I use stated responses from a discrete choice experiment to categorize households into three distinct groups of cookstoves preferences; interested in improved cookstoves, interested in electric cookstoves; uninterested. These groupings are then verified using actual stoves purchase decisions and I found large area of agreement between households stated responses and their purchase decisions.

Description

Provenance

Citation

Citation

Tan-Soo, Jie-Sheng (2015). Three Essays on Air Pollution in Developing Countries. Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9868.

Collections


Except where otherwise noted, student scholarship that was shared on DukeSpace after 2009 is made available to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution / Non-commercial / No derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) license. All rights in student work shared on DukeSpace before 2009 remain with the author and/or their designee, whose permission may be required for reuse.