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To what extent can long-differencing capture climate adaptation?

Dalia Ghanem, Felix Pretis, Daniel Schuurman

arXiv 24 Jul 2026 · Econometrics

arXiv:2607.22028 · PDF · Extracted main text

Abstract

Understanding the degree to which we are able to adapt to climate change is central to economic assessments of future climate damages. Economists increasingly use comparisons between long differences and fixed effects estimators to measure climate adaptation. We show that such comparisons can be misleading. Neither estimator is consistent for its intended parameter, as both the long-difference (LD) and fixed effects (FE) estimands are weighted averages of the long- and short-run responses to climate and weather. As a result, the difference between the two understates the true extent of adaptation, and the standard test based on this difference --while controlling size -- tends to be substantially underpowered in the settings researchers typically encounter. An empirically-calibrated simulation shows this difference understates adaptation by about 30--80%, depending on the averaging window.

Citation extraction

37
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65
in-text mentions
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distinct cited
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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 and Emerick, Kyle (2016) Adaptation to climate change: Evidence from US agriculture0.91417376%
2Bento, Antonio M and Miller, Noah and Mookerjee, Mehreen and Severni… (2023) A unifying approach to measuring climate change impacts and adaptation0.84333100%
3Griliches, Zvi and Hausman, Jerry A (1986) Errors in variables in panel data0.81142100%
4Lemoine, Derek (2018) Estimating the consequences of climate change from variation in weather0.81142100%
5Bilal, Adrien and Känzig, Diego R (2024) The macroeconomic impact of climate change: Global vs. local temperature0.64422100%
6Deryugina, Tatyana and Hsiang, Solomon (2017) The marginal product of climate0.64422100%
7Kolstad, Charles D and Moore, Frances C (2020) Estimating the economic impacts of climate change using weather observations0.51121100%
8Lemoine, Derek and Hausman, Catherine and Shrader, Jeffrey G (2025) A guide to climate damages0.51121100%
9Auffhammer, Maximilian (2022) Climate Adaptive Response Estimation: Short and long run impacts of climate change on residential electricity and natural gas co…0.40511100%
10Baylis, Patrick and Bharadwaj, Prashant and Mullins, Jamie T and Obr… (2025) Climate and migration in the United States0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 37 scored citations.