Amir Jina and I were recently discussing the multiple literature reviews that have come out on environment and development topics lately, and realized that there were so many we were starting to lose track. To that end, and as a service to those of you who aren't constantly trawling the working paper and journal lists, here's a quick rundown of the over ten (and counting) recent literature reviews that have come out in the newly emerging environment and development literature:
- Dell, Jones, and Olken's "What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature". Reviews the growing number of papers focusing on climate and weather impacts, and provides conceptual guidelines for using these results in IAMs and similar models.
- Greenstone and Jack's "Envirodevonomics". Explores low valuation of environmental quality in developing contexts, proposes four basic mechanisms through which this might occur, and reviews the environment and development literature in search of relevant evidence.
- Zivin and Neidell's "Environment, Health, and Human Capital". Highlights economists' main contributions to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and human health, and reviews the applied micro literature on pollution exposure.
- Kousky's "Informing climate adaptation: A review of the economic costs of natural disasters" (ungated RFF working paper here). Reviews the empirical literature on disaster impacts with an eye towards informing the adaptation literature.
- Hsiang, Burke, and Miguel's "Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict" (ungated version here). Metanalysis of the climate and conflict literature documenting a general relationship between climate fluctuations and conflict across both spatial and temporal scales. Accompanying review article is Hsiang and Burke's "Climate, Conflict and Social Stability: what does the evidence say?"
- Currie, Zivin, Mullins, and Neidell's "What Do We Know About Short and Long Term Effects of Early Life Exposure to Pollution?". Provides a conceptual model and reviews the empirical literature on the effects of early life pollution exposure.
- Auffhammer and Mansur's "Measuring Climatic Impacts on Energy Expenditures: A Review of the Empirical Literature". Overview of the empirical literature on climate fluctuations as a driver of energy demand.
- Auffhammer and Schlenker's "Empirical Studies on Agricultural Impacts and Adaptation" (forthcoming). Reviews the growing ag-climate literature and the empirical adaptation literature that has come from it.
- Deschênes' "Temperature, Human Health, and Adaptation: A Review of the Empirical Literature". Outlines conceptual issues related to deducing empirical relationships between temperature and health and overviews relevant literature with an eye towards informing IAMs.
- Almond and Currie's "Killing Me Softly: The Fetal Origins Hypothesis". Provides an overview of the explosion of literature on fetal origins / in-utero impacts on latter life outcomes that has emerged in the last decade.
- Auffhammer, Hsiang, Schlenker and Sobel's "Using Weather Data and Climate Model Output in Economic Analyses of Climate Change"provides a review of methods and issues associated with researching climate and its impact on social systems.
- Pattanyak and Pfaff's "Behavior, Environment, and Health in Developing Countries: Evaluation and Valuation" surveys the literature on the interaction between household behavior and environmental health problems and comes up with four generalizable policy pathways
