Income Shocks, Adaptation, and Temperature-Related Mortality: Evidence from the Mexican Labor Market

Luis Sarmiento, Martino Gilli, Filippo Pavanello and Soheil Shayegh

No 11542, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper examines the role of positive income shocks in helping workers adapt to extreme temperatures. We use daily temperature variations alongside the exogenous implementation of a wage and fiscal policy in Mexican municipalities along the US border to show that increased disposable income significantly reduces temperature-related mortality in treated areas. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that income gains increase households’ adaptive capacity, particularly through higher electricity expenditures and the purchase of electric heaters. Our findings provide causal estimates of how income influences the marginal effect of temperature on mortality and contribute to the debate on the effectiveness of climate-related redistribution policies.

Keywords: temperature; mortality; distributional effects; public policies; minimum wage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J81 J88 Q51 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-hea and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11542.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11542

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().