Anshuman Tiwari

Postdoctoral Scholar

Energy Policy Institute at University of Chicago - India

I am a postdoctoral scholar at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, India program. Before taking up this position, I was an Environmental Defense Fund fellow at the Environmental Markets Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I conducted doctoral research at the London School of Economics, where I was a Grantham Institute fellow and a member of the STICERD research group on the Economics of Energy and Environment. I hold a Master of Public Policy degree from UC Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (ISM) Dhanbad.

I am an applied economist who studies questions related to sustainable development and economic growth in developing countries. My research to date seeks to advance the economics of air and water pollution, climate change, and groundwater depletion. The research questions of interest to me are strongly informed by the specific institutions and political economy of developing countries such as India. I use large geospatial and administrative datasets, as well as machine learning methods to overcome missing data challenges. I have utilized structural models of economic geography, various causal inference methods, and big data in my work.

Publications

with Nick Hagerty

Sep 2025 Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. Volume 12, Number 5.

Industrial water pollution and agricultural production in India

We study how industrial water pollution affects agriculture in India, focusing on 48 industrial sites identified by the central government as “severely polluted.” We exploit the spatial discontinuity in pollution concentrations that these sites generate along a river, comparing villages immediately downstream and upstream of each site. To overcome data limitations, we use hydrological modeling to compute spatial relationships and machine learning to predict crop yields from satellite data. We find a large, sudden rise in pollutant concentrations in nearby rivers downstream of sites, but we do not detect lower crop yields on average. Yields do fall in specific areas, but aggregate impacts are small. Likely reasons are that not all farms are exposed, pollution dilutes before reaching crops, and industrial effluent can include beneficial nutrients. Water pollution may have other social costs, but damages to crop yields is probably not one of them.

PDF Published article Ideas4India

Revise and Resubmit

May 2025 R&R, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management

The effect of air pollution on GDP: evidence from a natural experiment in India

Estimating the effect of air pollution on aggregate economic output is challenging because pollution increases with GDP, biasing estimates upward. Standard approaches like differencing with district and year fixed effects reduce but do not eliminate this bias, necessitating a credible instrument. I leverage a natural experiment in India created by groundwater-conservation mandates in two northern states, which shifted crop-residue fires from October into November, when cool air and calm winds trap particulate matter. Satellite fire detections and wind trajectories show that a 10% increase in exposure to upwind November fires raises annual district PM2.5 by 0.3%, while October fires have no impact. Using this exogenous variation as an instrument in first-differenced district panels, I estimate a 1% rise in PM2.5 reduces real GDP by 0.18%, highlighting substantial economic damage from pollution in developing countries.

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Under Review

June 2025

Productivity impacts of pollution control when people and particulates are mobile

How do productivity gains from pollution control change when accounting for migration? Productivity gains depend on whether regulation improves air quality and health in productive cities, and on how strongly resulting amenity and wage improvements attract workers to those cities. Because emissions sources differ in pollutant dispersion, quantifying benefits requires explicit dispersion modelling. I incorporate dispersion into a spatial equilibrium model and compare gains from scenarios with similar health benefits targeting localized urban emissions versus rural crop-burning in India, both major contributors to urban pollution. Migration-driven productivity gains are 18 times larger under urban regulation, driving 6-fold greater overall benefits.

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March 2025

Do workfare programs affect weather-related agricultural risk through crop choice?

Workfare programs like India’s NREGS can smooth consumption under climate-driven weather shocks, but may alter production risk. Exploiting the staggered rollout and quasi-exogenous weather variation, I find higher yield volatility post-NREGS, including an additional 8% loss in bad rainfall years. To test a crop-choice channel, I build district risk indices from pre-NREGS revenue moments: riskier districts earn more in good years but lose more after negative shocks, capturing meaningful aggregate risk. Yet these indices do not explain the heightened sensitivity. Instead, NREGS dampens the usual pro-cyclical wage fall in dry years, raising labor costs and amplifying productivity shocks. Finally, greater NREGS use after a dry year worsens yields if the next year is also dry, but improves them if rains rebound—highlighting critical complementarities between social protection and farm productivity.

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Working papers

November 2025 Job market paper

Compliance without conservation when instruments interact

Do interacting instruments for related market failures undo conservation gains? I study India’s 2009 groundwater mandate, which delayed rice transplantation to reduce evapotranspiration losses, layered on an existing electricity ration that indirectly limits pumping. I develop a farm production model with a binding ration nested in a groundwater stock framework, and test its predictions using a synthetic difference-in-differences design. The mandate reduced rice yields by 3.9% without affecting other crops. Farmers expanded rice acreage, consistent with a rebound effect to exploit improved water efficiency. Because pumping hours are capped by the electricity ration, intensive-margin extraction cannot fall; at the same time, aligning irrigation with the monsoon diverts rainfall from recharge to on-farm use. Therefore, aggregate groundwater stock fall by 3–4%. Layering together uncoordinated instruments to address related distortions can result in costly compliance without conservation.

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In prep

In Prep With Tamma Carleton (UC Berkeley)

Rapid and sustained cooling reduces global inequity in climate impacts

The global poor bear the worst climate impacts while the rich are better adapted, partly due to income gains tied to their outsized historical emissions. Policy debates now emphasize methane abatement for rapid decadal cooling, but the equity effects are unclear. We compare rapid, slow, and delayed pathways—each achieved via methane (CH4) or carbon dioxide (CO2) abatement—to reach the same 2100 global mean surface temperature (GMST). Nonlinear damages with adaptation create ambiguity: later drastic cooling could avert more harm at higher GMST, yet income growth in poor regions raises the value of earlier cooling by enabling adaptation. Combining annual mortality damage functions for 24,378 regions with modeled temperature paths, we find: (1) mitigation always improves global equity in mortality; (2) even the least effective CH4 pathway saves more lives across the century than the most effective CO2 scenario, due to earlier, sustained cooling; and (3) within a gas, rapid action dominates slower and delayed action in lives saved.

Selected work in progress

The integration of renewables into the Indian electricity grid. With Fiona Burlig (UChicago), Akshaya Jha (CMU) and Louis Preonas (UMaryland)

Social norms, behavioral traits and electricity bill nonpayments in India. With Fiona Burlig (UChicago) and Anant Sudarshan (UWarwick). DERF grant USD 35,000.

The heterogeneous impacts of air pollution from coal plants in India. With Shefali Khanna (LSE) and Ed Rubin (UOregon). Lead PI, IGC grant GBP 18,842.

Vehicle electrification, air pollution and the role of time-of-day tariffs. With Rahul Tongia (CSEP), Anomitro Chatterjee (LSE), Piyush Bhardwaj (CSTEP). Lead PI, IGC grant GBP 28,500.

How should we estimate income elasticites for climate damages? With James Rising (UDelaware)

Teaching

Environmental Economics and Sustainable Development

Department of Economics, LSE, 2021

Overall teaching evaluation of 4.6 out of 5. (Dept. average was 4.2)

“The classes were really informative and engaging”
“...the professor and TA really knew what they were doing and were passionate about the material…”
“The quality of teaching exceeded my expectations. Both teacher and lecturer were excellent in their execution of teaching the course materials.”

Economics in Public Policy

Department of Economics, LSE, 2021

Overall teaching evaluation of 4.3 out of 5.

“Absolute legend! Best slides ever”
“always felt like i could ask for help / further explanation when needed”
“Great teacher, explains concepts well and uses good real life examples to understand the concept. Probably best class I have this year. Group activity is also quite interesting and has a good class structure.”