Jeffrey Shrader

Alex Mechanick and I have published an article on how economics research can better influence regulatory policy. You can find it here.

The blog post “Progress In Reducing Child Mortality” has been updated!

Manuel and I have written a new version of “Global Inequalities in Weather Forecasts”. It now analyzes more weather variable (adding precipitation), includes new analysis of seasonal forecasts, decomposes forecast accuracy differences across countries based on geography and weather-observing infrastructure, and more. The key message still remains: despite progress, weather forecasts are still substantially worse, on average, in low-income countries around the world.

Working Under the Sun: The Role of Occupation in Temperature-Related Mortality in Mexico has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Human Resources.

New working paper! Derek Lemoine, Catie Hausman, and I have written a review of the economics literature studying damages from climate change. The heart of the review is an argument that, to estimate climate change damages, any single method faces a trilemma. We’d all like to study climate change, which is persistent, widespread, and anticipated. But to do so, papers must trade off quasi-experimental identification, robustness to economic model structure, or fully capturing all of the features of climate change. Rather than cause for despair, though, we view this trilemma as meaning we should embrace the strengths of multiple, different empirical approaches to understanding the economics of climate change. I learned a ton from writing the paper, and I’ll share some highlights in the coming weeks!

One of the clearest forms of human progress is the reduction in infant and child mortality. But I hadn't appreciated just how recent, widespread, and fast this progress has been until reading [this article from Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past). Consistently across the world, mortality for children under the age of 15 was 40 to 60% basically up until 1900. Then it dropped to 4. (...more)