Welcome! I am a PostDoctoral Fellow at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management.
I work on questions in environmental and climate economics using tools from empirical IO.
I received my PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. In July 2026, I will be joining UCL as an Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Economics.
Curriculum Vitae
Working Papers
Updated: April 2026
Winner of the 2025 Rising Star Paper Prize at the International Industrial Organization Conference
Abstract (click to expand): As climate risks intensify, governments increasingly subsidize insurance against weather shocks. While these subsidies enhance short-run financial protection, they may dampen incentives for long-run adaptation to climate change. This paper studies how U.S. crop insurance subsidies shape agricultural adaptation. I develop and estimate a dynamic land-use model in which forward-looking farmers form beliefs about climate trends and make joint planting and insurance decisions
under alternative subsidy regimes. Targeting subsidies toward regions with slower projected increases in climate risk partially mitigates the distortions created
by the status quo by improving the spatial allocation of production. However, most gains come from decoupling subsidies from actuarially fair premiums,
thereby restoring adaptation incentives.
(with Marco Tabellini and Charles Taylor)
Updated: January 2026
Revise and Resubmit, Quaterly Journal of Economics
Abstract (click to expand): This paper examines the concept of “climate matching” in migration---the idea that migrants seek out destinations with familiar climates. Focusing on the US, we document that temperature distance between origin and destination predicts the distribution of migrants across counties. This pattern holds for internal and international migration in the past (1850-1940) and today (2011-2019), and is not explained by the spatial
correlation of climate or the persistence of ethnic networks. We provide suggestive evidence for two mechanisms driving climate matching:
climate-specific skills and climate-as-amenity. Then, we study the implications of climate matching for migrants. Leveraging plausibly exogenous
variation in climate mismatch, we document that climate distance reduces life expectancy among immigrants, and increases mortality rates for
their US-born children. We calculate an individual-level mortality cost of a 1°C change in climate to be \$5,250.
NBER version
Selected Coverage:
VoxEU
(with Emma Du Puy)
Updated: December 2025
Abstract (click to expand): Modern agricultural landscapes are becoming increasingly homogeneous, driven by the rise of monoculture and the pursuit of economies of scale through larger, more contiguous tracts of land. The ecological consequences of this landscape simplification remain poorly quantified. We use the historical diffusion of the boll weevil across the U.S. Cotton Belt to causally link crop diversity to pest resilience. By developing a harmonized dataset that links historical agricultural censuses over time and leveraging terrain ruggedness as an instrument for local crop diversity, we show that more diverse croplands significantly slow pest spread. A one-standard-deviation increase in crop diversity reduces annual contamination risk by 12 percentage points, or 36 percent relative to the mean annual risk. This study demonstrates that enhancing crop diversity can serve as an important component of sustainable pest management.
Works in Progress
News Media Concentration and Content Diversity
(with Pierre Bodéré and Nicolas Longuet-Marx)
Abstract (click to expand): The rise in political polarization over the recent years has fostered scrutiny of the structure of the news industry's influence on political outcomes. How should policymakers regulate news producers when they value news diversity and large publishers shape the ideological landscape? We develop an empirical model of competition for readership and advertisers between news producers. We recover the topic content and ideological positions of 200 major U.S. daily newspapers using recent advances in Natural Language Processing on millions of published articles. We find that over the period 2007-2017, the median newspaper in our sample got closer to the ideology of the Democratic party. Second, we embed these topics and ideal points in a demand model for differentiated products with heterogeneous readers. Our model shows that rich readers lean democrat and consume more news about social and political questions while the elderly are more conservative and care more about local news. Using the estimated demand model and data on advertising contracts and readership, we can recover the cost of producing each type of content. Given this model of news supply, we intend to use our framework to provide recommendations on antitrust rules weighing both consumer welfare and ideological diversity.
Policy Papers
Risk and Risk Management in the Agricultural Economy, University of Chicago Press, 2026.
Abstract (click to expand): This paper quantifies how climate change affects federal outlays on premium subsidies in the
U.S. Federal Crop Insurance Program under the status quo subsidy schedule.
Using the dynamic model of land use and insurance choice developed in Obolensky (2026),
I compare a stationary-climate baseline to a climate-change counterfactual over 2030–2050 and compute equilibrium paths
for premiums, insurance participation and contract choice, cultivated acreage, and prices. Climate change increases
aggregate subsidy outlays by 9.9 percent on average over 2030–2050. Fiscal impacts are highly spatially
heterogeneous, with county-level changes ranging from –30 percent to 60 percent. To clarify mechanisms,
I implement a Shapley-value accounting decomposition that separates the change in subsidy outlays into
four channels: (i) premium growth driven by shifts in yield loss risk, (ii) changes in insurance participation
and contract choice, (iii) changes in cultivated area and crop allocation that alter subsidized exposure, and (iv)
premium growth driven by equilibrium price feedbacks induced by aggregate acreage adjustment. The results show that
higher loss risk is the dominant driver of subsidy growth, insurance demand modestly amplifies spending, and
land-use adjustment partially offsets fiscal exposure by reducing insured acres and shifting production toward
relatively safer crops. However, land-use adjustment also raises equilibrium prices, increasing insurance liability
and placing upward pressure on premiums. The results provide a transparent mapping from climate risk into federal
fiscal exposure under current crop-insurance policy and clarify how endogenous adaptation reshapes subsidy growth.
(with Alvina Erman, Mersedeh Tariverdi, Xiaomeng Chen, Rose Vincent, Silvia Malgioglio, Jun Rentschler, Stéphane Hallegatte, Nobuo Yoshida)
World Bank Research Working Paper, 2019.
Abstract (click to expand): Dar es Salaam is frequently affected by severe flooding causing destruction and impeding daily life of its 4.5 million inhabitants. The focus of this paper is on the role of poverty in the impact of floods on households, focusing on both direct (damage to or loss of assets or property) and indirect (losses involving health, infrastructure, labor, and education) impacts using household survey data. Poorer households are more likely to be affected by floods; directly affected households are more likely female-headed and have more insecure tenure arrangements; and indirectly affected households tend to have access to poorer quality infrastructure. Focusing on the floods of April 2018, affected households suffered losses of 23 percent of annual income on average. Surprisingly, poorer households are not over-represented among the households that lost the most - even in relation to their income, possibly because 77 percent of total losses were due to asset losses, with richer households having more valuable assets. Although indirect losses were relatively small, they had significant well-being effects for the affected households. It is estimated that households? losses due to the April 2018 flood reached more than US$100 million, representing between 2-4 percent of the gross domestic product of Dar es Salaam. Furthermore, poorer households were less likely to recover from flood exposure. The report finds that access to finance play an important role in recovery for households.
(with Jun Rentschler and Martin Kornejew)
World Bank Research Working Paper, 2019.
Abstract (click to expand): This study finds that natural shocks—storms in particular—are a significant and often leading cause for power supply disruptions. This finding is based on 20 years of high frequency (i.e. daily) data on power outages and climate variables in 28 countries—Bangladesh, the United States and 26 European countries. More specifically: (1) Natural shocks are the most important cause of power outages in developed economies. On average, they account for more than 50 of annual outage duration in both the US and Europe. In contrast, natural shocks are responsible for a small share of outages in Bangladesh, where disruptions occur on a daily basis for a variety of reasons. (2) Outages due to natural shocks are found to last significantly longer than those due to non-natural shocks—e.g. more than 4.5 times in Europe. Reasons include the challenge of locating wide-spread damages, and the sustained duration of storms. (3) Several factors can reinforce the adverse effect of natural shocks on power supply. In the US, forest cover is shown to significantly increase the risk of power outages when storms occur. (4) There are significant differences in network fragility. For instance, wind speeds above 35 km/h are found to be 12 times more likely to cause an outage in Bangladesh than in the US. This difference may be explained by a range of factors, including investments in infrastructure resilience and maintenance.
(with Jun Rentschler, Martin Kornejew, Stéphane Hallegatte and Johannes Braese)
World Bank Research Working Paper, 2019.
Abstract (click to expand): This study constructs a microdata set of about 143,000 firms to estimate the monetary costs of infrastructure disruptions in 137 low- and middle-income countries, representing 78 percent of the world population and 80 percent of the GDP of low- and -middle-income countries. Specifically, this study assesses the impact of transport, electricity, and water disruptions on the capacity utilization rates of firms. The estimates suggest that utilization losses amount to $151 billion a year—of which $107 billion are due to transport disruptions, $38 billion due to blackouts, and $6 billion due to dryouts. Moreover, this study shows that electricity outages are causing sales losses equivalent to $82 billion a year. Firms are also incurring the costs of self-generated electricity, estimated to amount to $64 billion a year (including annualized capital expenditure). At almost $300 billion a year, these figures highlight the substantial drag that unreliable infrastructure imposes on firms in developing countries. Yet, these figures are likely to be under-estimates as neither all countries nor all types of impacts are covered.
(with Alvina Erman, Julie Rozenberg, Jun Rentschler, Paolo Avner and Stéphane Hallegatte)
World Bank Research Working Paper, 2019.
Abstract (click to expand): This review examines the literature on the welfare impacts of infrastructure disruptions. There is widespread evidence that households suffer from the consequences of a lack of infrastructure reliability, and that being connected to the grid is not sufficient to close the infrastructure gap. Disruptions and irregular service have adverse effects on household welfare, due to missed work and education opportunities, and negative impact on health. Calibrating costs of unreliable infrastructure on existing willingness to pay assessments, we estimate the welfare losses associated with blackouts and water outages. Overall, between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of GDP would be lost each year because of unreliable infrastructure—electricity, water and transport.
Miscellaneous
Website: This website design is based on Gautam Rao’s GitHub repository.
