Anshuman Tiwari

Postdoctoral Scholar

Energy Policy Institute at University of Chicago

I am a postdoctoral scholar at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. Beginning in the 2026–27 academic year, I will join Ashoka University as an Assistant Professor of Economics.

Previously, I was an Environmental Defense Fund fellow at the Environmental Markets Lab (emLab) at UC Santa Barbara. I completed my PhD on a Grantham Fellowship at the London School of Economics, where I was affiliated with the STICERD research group on the Economics of Energy and Environment. I hold a Masters degree in Public Policy from UC Berkeley, and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (ISM) Dhanbad.

My research falls into four categories. The first measures the economic costs of air and water pollution and the gains from reducing them. The second studies the consequences of underpricing resources in India, such as groundwater overuse in agriculture. The third examines the effectiveness of the energy transition in India through the lens of electric vehicle adoption under a coal-dominated grid. The fourth studies inequity in climate impacts and assesses specific adaptation strategies. Throughout, I endeavour to work in partnership with policymakers and pay close attention to the institutions and political economy that determine whether policy works.

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

April 2026 R&R submitted, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management

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

Estimating the effect of particulate air pollution on aggregate economic output is challenging because pollution increases with GDP, biasing estimates upward. The standard approach is to instrument for pollution using upwind emissions alongside first-differencing with fixed effects. I show that fire-based instruments in India face a previously unrecognized threat to the exclusion restriction: crop residue burning at upwind origins is temporally aligned with harvest seasons at downwind destinations, and harvest seasons independently raise local economic activity. Reduced-form regressions of monthly fire exposure on annual GDP confirm this, with positive coefficients during the harvest months of April and May. I exploit seasonal asymmetry in pollution accumulation over the North Indian Plain to isolate the pollution channel: cool, calm winter air traps particulate matter near the surface to make November the only harvest month in which upwind fires raise annual PM2.5 enough for the pollution channel to dominate the harvest-income channel. Using November fire exposure as an instrument for annual PM2.5 in a panel of 530 Indian districts between 2007 and 2013, I estimate that a 1% rise in PM2.5 reduces real district GDP by 0.24%. The effect is concentrated in the northern plain districts where the meteorological mechanism operates and is largest in agriculture and informal services, where adaptation is most constrained.

PDF

June 2026 R&R submitted, Environment and Development Economics

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

Workfare programs are increasingly popular for smoothing consumption, particularly in response to climate risks, yet their impacts on crop yields remain poorly understood. Using India’s rollout of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in a panel framework, I document an 8% additional yield loss during ad- verse rainfall years when the program came into force. To investigate if this additional yield volatility arises from farmers switching to riskier, high-yield crops-due to NREGS’s insurance effect—I construct indices that capture pre-program crop revenue risks. These indices predict higher yields in good rainfall years but lower yields under negative shocks. However, I find that NREGS does not increase aggregate crop choice risk, and thus cannot explain increased weather sensitivity of yield. Instead, I find suggestive evidence that counter-cyclical provision could ration farm labor and lead to the observed yield impacts. These findings highlight a potential concern for aggregate food security from workfare programs.

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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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Working papers

July 2026 Job market paper

When Conservation Backfires: Efficiency-Induced Groundwater Depletion under Electricity Rationing in India

Efficiency improvements have long been theorized to backfire on the resources they target, yet empirical evaluations of conservation policy largely document partial offset — a ”rebound effect.” This paper provides causal evidence of backfire, in a setting where rationing of a complementary input channels the user response onto the extensive margin. Two Indian states mandated delayed rice transplantation to raise on-farm water-use efficiency, atop a uniform electricity ration that caps pumping and an output-price floor that keeps rice remunerative. Using synthetic differencein-differences, I find groundwater stocks fell 10% as farmers expanded rice acreage by 13%, and that pumping capacity reallocated toward deeper aquifers. Depletion is steepest where the water table is deepest and the ration binds hardest; because outputprice incidence does not vary with depth, this gradient isolates the binding-ration channel. Efficiency gains under input rationing are spent extending cultivation, and conservation backfires.

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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.

EPIC India dialogue

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.”