Dear All,

The Department of Economics invites you to their weekly seminar on Wednesday, September 11th, 2024.

Time: 1:40 PM to 2:50 PM

Venue: AC04-301

Speaker:  Aranya Chakraborty

Title: “Lessons from the Past: How Experience Reduces the Impact of Weather Shocks on Ugandan Smallholders” joint work with Giuseppe Maggio (University of Palermo) and Fabio G. Santeramo (University of Foggia & European University Institute)

Abstract: By experiencing weather shocks, do people learn how to better cope with them? We use a unique four-wave panel household dataset from Uganda, merged with granular historical weather records, to understand the nexus between experience, weather shocks, and agricultural performances. Our identification strategy exploits cross-sectional variation in the climate experience of immigrant members of the households and the temporal variation in the realization of the weather shocks during the survey years. Our results show that, although temperature shocks are detrimental to everyone's agricultural performance, households with more experience perform differentially better. Our findings are robust to placebo tests on the timing of shocks and falsification tests on the realization of the experience. We further document that the differential effect of climate experience on performance is independent of an unrelated experience variable capturing households' familiarity with soil characteristics. We find the adoption of risk-reducing technologies to be the driving factor behind the gains of the households with more experience. Our analysis highlights the importance of policies promoting learning through experience.

We look forward to having you with us.

—

Regards

Department of Economics

Ashoka University