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A Machine Learning Approach to Measuring Climate Adaptation

Max Vilgalys

arXiv 2 Feb 2023 · Statistics — Applications

arXiv:2302.01236 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

I measure adaptation to climate change by comparing elasticities from short-run and long-run changes in damaging weather. I propose a debiased machine learning approach to flexibly measure these elasticities in panel settings. In a simulation exercise, I show that debiased machine learning has considerable benefits relative to standard machine learning or ordinary least squares, particularly in high-dimensional settings. I then measure adaptation to damaging heat exposure in United States corn and soy production. Using rich sets of temperature and precipitation variation, I find evidence that short-run impacts from damaging heat are significantly offset in the long run. I show that this is because the impacts of long-run changes in heat exposure do not follow the same functional form as short-run shocks to heat exposure.

Citation extraction

38
references
108
in-text mentions
38
distinct cited
1
self-citations
11,133
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 77% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Burke, Marshall, Emerick, Kyle (2016) Adaptation to climate change: Evidence from US agriculture1.000235100%
2Schlenker, Wolfram, Roberts, Michael J (2009) Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to U.S. crop yields under climate change.1.000115100%
3Klosin, Sylvia, Vilgalys, Max (2022) Estimating Continuous Treatment Effects in Panel Data using Machine Learning with an Agricultural Application self0.9507386%
4Chernozhukov, Victor, Newey, Whitney K, Singh, Rahul (2022) Automatic debiased machine learning of causal and structural effects0.90916375%
5Crane-Droesch, Andrew (2018) Machine learning methods for crop yield prediction and climate change impact assessment in agriculture0.87472100%
6Barreca, Alan, Clay, Karen, Deschenes, Olivier, Greenstone, Michael,… (2016) Adapting to climate change: The remarkable decline in the US temperature-mortality relationship over the Twentieth Century0.73732100%
7Chernozhukov, Victor, Chetverikov, Denis, Demirer, Mert, Duflo, Esth… (2018) Double/debiased machine learning for treatment and structural parameters0.73732100%
8Schlenker, Wolfram, Roberts, Michael J (2006) Nonlinear Effects of Weather on Corn Yields*0.73732100%
9Lemoine, Derek (2018) Estimating the Consequences of Climate Change from Variation in Weather0.58531100%
10Hsiang, Solomon (2016) Climate econometrics0.51121100%

Showing the top 10 of 38 scored citations.