A Unifying Approach to Measuring Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation

Abstract

We develop a unifying approach to estimating climate impacts and adaptation, and apply it to study the impact of climate change on local air pollution. Economic agents are usually constrained when responding to daily weather shocks, but may adjust to long-run climatic changes. By exploiting simultaneously variation in weather and climatic changes, we identify both the short- and long-run impacts on economic outcomes, and measure adaptation directly as the difference between those responses. As a result, we identify adaptation without making extrapolations of weather responses over time or space, and overcome prior studies' biases in the estimates of climate adaptation.