Dissertation Defense: “Essays in Environmental, Development, and Labor Economics”, Jimena Rico Straffon, University of California, Santa Barbara

Speaker

Jimena Rico Straffon, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biography

Jimena is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research lies at the intersection of environmental, labor, and development economics. Her current work examines how urban piped-water shortages affect labor supply in Mexico City, documenting heterogeneous impacts by gender and type of worker. She uses quasi-experimental methods and geospatial analysis to study the socioeconomic and conservation impacts of environmental policies and shocks, drawing on granular panel data from household surveys, administrative records, and remote sensing.

Title

“Essays in Environmental, Development, and Labor Economics”

Abstract

This dissertation examines how environmental challenges and governance shape economic behavior, resource use, and inequality in developing countries. Across three chapters, I combine high-frequency panel data, geospatial analysis, satellite imagery, and quasi-experimental methods.

The first chapter, my job market paper, estimates the short-run labor supply impacts of piped water shortages in Mexico City. Urban water shortages are an increasingly urgent challenge in large cities, driven by population growth, climate change, and aging infrastructure. In Mexico City—where households lack alternative sources—disruptions to piped supply force residents to wait at home for public deliveries or purchase water from private trucks and bottled suppliers. These shocks affect both time and income, creating theoretically ambiguous effects on labor supply. I combine high-frequency labor panel data with a novel proxy that interacts rainfall-driven variation in upstream reservoir storage with each neighborhood’s position in the city’s gravity-fed pipeline network. A drop in reservoir levels from the median to the fifth percentile reduces weekly hours worked by about one hour on average. Effects are heterogeneous: female formal employees—with access to job protections—reduce hours worked, consistent with a time-allocation response, while female informal employees increase hours, consistent with income-smoothing behavior. These findings highlight how gender roles and job informality mediate labor supply responses to urban water insecurity.

The second chapter, coauthored with Zhenhua Wang, Stephanie Panlasigui, Jennifer Swenson, Colby Loucks, and Alexander Pfaff, studies the impacts of logging concessions and eco-certifications on forest loss in the Peruvian Amazon between 2002 and 2018. Using high-resolution satellite imagery and robust difference-in-differences estimators, we estimate how these forest governance regimes affect deforestation. We find that logging concessions—which in theory could either increase or reduce forest loss—did not increase deforestation and, if anything, slightly reduced it by limiting spikes in deforestation pressure. In contrast, eco-certifications show no detectable impacts on forest loss.

The third chapter, coauthored with Zhenhua Wang, Colby Loucks, and Alexander Pfaff, further examines when extraction rights can help conserve forests. Using newly available global forest data that capture both deforestation and forest degradation, we estimate the impacts of logging concessions and eco-certifications across different timber regions of the Peruvian Amazon. While average effects remain small, disaggregating across regions reveals important heterogeneity: concessions reduce deforestation more strongly in areas facing higher deforestation pressure. In
addition, concessions reduce transitions from degraded forest to deforested land, suggesting they may help stabilize forests under pressure. Eco-certifications again show no effects on forest outcomes. Together, these results highlight how the impacts of forest governance depend on local pressures and ecological conditions.

JEL Codes: H42, J16, J22, O13, Q23, Q25, Q56

Event Details

Join us to hear Jimena’s dissertation defense. She will be presenting her dissertation titled, "Essays in
Environmental, Development, and Labor Economics". To access a copy of the dissertation, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.