Anshuman Tiwari

Anshuman Tiwari

Postdoctoral Fellow

UC Santa Barbara

Environmental Defense Fund

Welcome to my website!

I am an economist currently on an off-market postdoctoral fellowship at the Bren School at UC Santa Barbara. I completed my PhD from the LSE in 2022, where I was affiliated with the Grantham Research Institute and the STICERD EEE program.

I seek to study the interactions between economic growth and environmental change in low and middle income countries, particularly the role of policy in enabling people and firms to mitigate or adapt to environmental damage.

In my JMP, I demonstrate that the importance of migration for GDP gains in general equilibrium from targeted air pollution control depends on the geography of the pollution source. Comparing abatement of localized urban sources like vehicles with distant rural sources like agricultural fires in India, I find that migration to cities accounts for half of the GDP gains for the former as opposed to <1% of gains for the latter. Rural abatement cleans up rural area more and reduces migration incentives.

References

Job Market Paper

Pollution, Productivity, and Place

How do the health benefits of reducing air pollution translate into aggregate income gains? Income gains can differ from health benefits because labor productivity may vary in the places where people experience lower pollution, and because labor reallocation to those places may reinforce agglomeration economies. This paper shows that incorporating two physical features of pollution sources - their location and long-distance dispersion tendency - can alter the importance of labor productivity and reallocation, and lead to very different income gains from pollution control policies that otherwise produce similar population health benefits. To understand these interactions, I develop a spatial equilibrium model that accounts for the movement of both pollution and people across space. I apply this model to study income gains from two archetypal pollution control policies that target non-industrial sources in India andproduce similar population exposure reductions, but in very different places. One policy controls agricultural fires in northwestern India that spread pollution across much of north India, and another policy reduces localized emissions from sourcessuch as vehicles within India’s 10 largest cities. Accounting only for differential labor productivity in the places experiencing lower pollution, I find that the latter policy leads to a 3 times larger GDP gain relative to the former. Further accounting for labor reallocation and agglomeration economies leads to a 6 times larger GDP gain. These results have implications for spatial targeting of pollution, especially in polluted-yet-poor LMICs.

Working Papers

Industrial Water Pollution and Agricultural Production in India

Selected work in progress

Highways and the Spatial Distribution of Industrial Water Pollution

The Heterogeneous Impacts of Air Pollution on Workers and Firms in India (with Tamma Carleton and Shefali Khanna)

Transport Costs Reductions and Air Pollution Exposure (with Tamma Carleton and Kyle Meng)

Barriers to Electric Vehicle Adoption by Small Firms in India (with Azhar Hussain)

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 fact that 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.”

The Economic Geography of Trade, Production and Development

LSE, 2019

Introduction to Probability and Statistics

UC Berkeley, 2013-2015

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