Dr. Chih Ming Tan paper accepted in the Journal of Population Economics
Prof. Tan’s paper on “The Effects of Prenatal Exposure to Temperature Extremes on Birth Outcomes: The Case of China” has been accepted at the Journal of Population Economics (JQL Tier 4). The Journal of Population Economics is an international quarterly that publishes original theoretical and applied research in all areas of population economics.
This paper was an international collaborative effort employing a data set from China’s National Disease Surveillance Points (DSP) system with over a million birth observations. Prof. Tan’s coauthors on this paper are Prof. Xi Chen from the Yale School of Public Health, Yale University, Prof. Xiaobo Zhang who holds joint appointments at the National School of Development, Peking University, and the Division of Development Strategy and Governance, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington D. C., and Prof. Xin Zhang from the School of Statistics, Beijing Normal University.
Their work contributes to a rapidly emerging literature examining the global impact of climate change on vulnerable populations. Climate change has induced more frequent yet largely unpredictable extreme weather events, such as days of extreme temperatures (heat waves and polar vortices), precipitation (flooding and drought), and windstorm variation (hurricanes). In response to the increasing number of extreme weather events, there is a growing body of work examining the impact of exposure to these events at various stages of the life cycle. Prof. Tan’s paper investigates the effects of prenatal exposure to extreme temperatures on birth outcomes—specifically, birth weight — using a nationally representative dataset in rural China. During the span of the data (i.e., 1991–2000), indoor air-conditioning was not widely available and migration was limited, allowing the authors to address identification issues endemic in the climate change literature related to adaptation and location sorting. They find substantial heterogeneity in the effects of extreme temperature exposure on birth outcomes. In particular, prenatal exposure to heat waves has stronger negative effects than exposure to cold spells on survivors.
