Dr. Teevrat Garg, University of California, San Diego
Seminar Title: “Spatial Externalities of Power Provision in India”
Abstract: Developing countries characterized by increasing electricity demand face a dilemma: fossil-fuel fired electricity production is cheap and reliable yet has substantial environmental consequences. This paper uses a difference-in-differences framework to quantify the relative local environmental costs versus economic benefits of increases in coal-fired capacity on locations close to versus far away from power plants in India. We show that increases in coal-fired capacity result in sizable increases in air pollution and infant mortality. In contrast, coal-fired capacity increases have small, statistically insignificant impacts on local economic benefits, measured using data on district-level GDP as well as survey and census data on output, wages, and employment in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. Combined, our results indicate that the environmental costs of coal-fired power plants vary substantially over space while the economic benefits associated with these plants are distributed equally across the state. This suggests that new coal-fired power plants should primarily be sited based on environmental costs.
Thursday, March 28, 2019
1:00pm-2:15pm
Location: W.B. Young 304
View the full Spring 2019 ARE Seminar Schedule
For more information, contact: Tatiana Andreyeva at tatiana.andreyeva@uconn.edu