Jeffrey Shrader

New working paper, coauthored with Tarikua Erda, on how people are judged for wearing different hair styles, focusing on academic settings. Black women face the strongest penalties for wearing natural hair styles.

Global Inequalities in Weather Forecasts, coauthored with Manuel Linsenmeier, has now been accepted at Nature Communications, making it my 5th publication or accepted paper of the year so far!

SIPA has released a Q&A with me and Stephan Thies on our new paper in PNAS.

Assume we have a time machine and transport ourselves to the year 2100. Would we, with the benefit of decades of extra data, be able to use purely reduced-form econometric methods to estimate the overall economic damage from climate change? I say no. But I also say that we can make progress on understanding climate change impacts by being more syncretic in our methods and by leveraging knowledge from other (non-climate-related) areas of economics. (...more)

New paper in PNAS, joint with the wonderful Sustainable Development PhD student Stephan Thies as well as the usual suspects on my weather forecast work (Derek, Laura, Manuel). Headline findings: More accurate weather forecasts save lives, especially during extreme heat. Continued improvements in short-range temperature forecasts could reduce heat-related mortality in the U.S. by ~20% by the end of the century. That would offset nearly all of the increase in deaths under moderate climate change. But this is also “running to stay in place”: without climate change, these same improvements would lead to substantial declines in heat-related mortality. Surveyed operational meteorologists expect forecasts to keep improving, and realizing those improvements will require sustained investment in weather data and model development (including AI models).

Manuel Linsenmeier and I have a new piece in VoxDev on global inequalities in weather forecasts. As we say in the piece, “Weather forecasts in low-income countries are about 20 years behind those in high-income countries, worsening economic losses and increasing vulnerability to climate-related risks.” We also offer some thoughts on how to make this situation better!