About
Welcome! I am a PhD student in the Sustainable Development program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
I am an environmental economist working on applied microeconomic and interdisciplinary research. I am particularly interested in climate adaptation and plastic pollution. I use remote sensing and non-traditional data in a lot of my projects.
I graduated from Harvard University, where I studied Environmental Engineering and Computer Science. Before starting my PhD, I worked as a research assistant at Yale School of Management and as an equity research associate at AB Bernstein.
Curriculum Vitae (Updated March 2024)
Email: ap3907@columbia.edu
Twitter: @annapappp
Google Scholar: here
Publications
(with Douglas Almond, Shuang Zhang)
Journal of Public Economics, 2023
Abstract (click to expand): Environmental externalities from cryptomining may be large, but have not been linked causally to mining incentives. We exploit daily variation in Bitcoin price as a natural experiment for an 86 megawatt waste coal-fired power plant with on-site cryptomining. We find that carbon emissions respond swiftly to mining incentives, with price elasticities of 0.69–0.71 in the short-run and 0.33–0.40 in the longer run. A $1 increase in Bitcoin price leads to $3.11–$6.79 in external damages from carbon emissions alone, well exceeding cryptomining’s value added (using a $190 social cost of carbon, but ignoring increased local air pollution). As cryptomining requires ever more computing power to mine a given number of blocks, our study highlights both the revitalization of US fossil assets and the need for financial industry accounting to incorporate cryptomining externalities.
(with Douglas Almond, Xinming Du)
Nature Climate Change, 2022
Abstract (click to expand): Methane is 28 to 86 times more potent as a driver of global warming than CO2. Global methane concentrations have increased at an accelerating rate since 2004, yet the role of fossil fuels and revitalized natural gas extraction and distribution in accelerating methane concentrations is poorly recognized. Here we examine the policy positioning of university-based energy centres towards natural gas, given their growing influence on climate discourse. We conducted sentiment analysis using a lexicon- and rule-based sentiment scoring tool on 1,168,194 sentences in 1,706 reports from 26 universities, some of which receive their primary funding from the natural gas industry. We found that fossil-funded centres are more favourable in their reports towards natural gas than towards renewable energy, and tweets are more favourable when they mention funders by name. Centres less dependent on fossil funding show a reversed pattern with more neutral sentiment towards gas, and favour solar and hydro power.
Working Papers
(with Florian Grosset, Charles Taylor)
Working Paper, December 2023
Abstract (click to expand): Human actions can alter the regional climate, particularly via land use. We analyze the Great Plains Shelterbelt, a large-scale forestation program in the 1930s across the US Midwest. This program led to a decades-long increase in precipitation and decrease in temperature. Changes extended to adjacent unforested land up to 200km away - enabling us to directly study climate adaptation. In downwind places facing improved growing conditions, farmers expanded corn acreage and switched to more water-intensive production. This paper highlights the endogeneity of the climate to land use changes, and the potential for tree planting to regionally mitigate climate change impacts.
Available on SSRN
Are plastic bag regulations effective in reducing plastic litter? Evidence from shoreline cleanups
(with Kimberly L. Oremus)
Submitted
Abstract (click to expand): As the dangers of plastic debris to marine animals and its adverse impacts on ecosystem services are now well-documented, reducing mismanaged plastic waste has become a policy priority in countries around the world. In the United States, single-use bag bans and charges are growing in popularity; we estimate approximately a third of Americans now live in areas with bag restrictions. While previous studies have focused on how these policies affect consumption of plastic and other bag types, their ultimate impact on marine litter is harder to measure and thus remains unknown. Using citizen science data on 97,774 U.S. shoreline cleanups, and exploiting differences in the timing and geographic scope of U.S. bag policies, we find that bag policies lead to a 22-25% decrease in plastic bags as a share of total items collected at cleanups. Both state- and county-level policies are effective in reducing plastic bag litter in the environment, while town-level policies are not. At a time when some jurisdictions are considering implementing bag policies while others are preemptively prohibiting such regulations, our study provides large-scale evidence on the effectiveness of both command-and-control and market-based policies in reducing plastic pollution.
Work in Progress
Climate adaptation and the gig economy
Pollution, plastics, and the global trade in garbage
(with Matthew Gordon)
Funding: STEG Initiative at CEPR, Minderoo Foundation
Abstract (click to expand): What are the impacts of the global trade in plastic waste? Since a 1991 World Bank memo argued, “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable” cross country flows of plastic waste have increased seven-fold. Yet the consequences of this trade are poorly understood, partially due to the lack of basic descriptive data about what happens to exported waste at its many destinations. Using satellite data and a machine-learning algorithm trained on crowd-sourced data, we study the spread of informal dumps before and after a major shock to the global trade in waste. Our preliminary findings show that the dumps create severe externalities, while the benefits to jobs and wages appear modest.
The origin and fate of marine plastic pollution
(with Amir Jina, Kimberly L. Oremus, Nandini Ramesh)
Academic Presentations
2024: AERE@ASSA Annual Meeting
2023: World Bank-GWU-UVA Economics of Sustainable Development Conference, CEEP-Federal Reserve Bank of New York Environmental Economics and Policy Conference, LSE Environment Week, AERE@AAEA Annual Conference, Harvard Climate Economics Pipeline Workshop, Interdisciplinary PhD Workshop in Sustainable Development
2022: American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, The Workshop in Environmental Economics and Data Science (TWEEDS), Northeast Workshop on Energy Policy and Environmental Economics, AERE Summer Conference
Teaching
Causal Inference Workshop
I updated Claire Palandri’s version of the workshop and am leading it for PhD Students in Sustainable Development in Spring 2024. You can find materials for it here.
Other Teaching at SIPA
Instructor (Master’s), Analytics in Env. Science Policy [Summer 2020,2021]
Teaching Fellow (Master’s), Microeconomics & Public Policy II [Spring 2021]
Teaching Fellow (Master’s), Economic Development [Fall 2020]
Miscellaneous
Code: To work through (some of) the new two-way fixed effects/dynamic diff-in-diff methods, my grad school colleague Vincent Bagilet and I have put together set of simulations, example datasets, and code (as part of Jeffrey Shrader’s lab), which you can find here.
Non-academic interests: I grew up in Budapest, Hungary. In my free time I enjoy hiking, camping, packrafting (check out my trip reports here), vegan food, and my favorite boardgame.
Website: This website design is based on Gautam Rao’s GitHub repository. Thank you for making it public!
