Wensu Li

Keywords: climate change, extreme weather, job flexibility, work at home

The increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events is one of the consequences of global warming. Investigating the impacts of extreme weather on people’s work patterns in the context of work flexibility helps us to better evaluate and adapt to climate change. This paper links the data from American Time Use Survey with Storm Database from NOAA to examine how extreme weather changes people's work patterns. The results show that job flexibility plays an important role in shaping people's adaptation to extreme weather. For workers that have the flexibility to work at home, during extreme events, about 45 minutes of work time is shifted from their workplace to their home on business days. Extreme weather events decrease the probability of going out to work by 12.2% on average. However, no such location adaptation is detected for workers with little job flexibility. In terms of total work time, extreme weather events reduce labor supply by a small amount of 9 minutes, with this time reallocated to leisure. These findings suggest that job flexibility policies, such as working at home, could be an effective tool of adaptation to climate change because it offers a choice to avoid the risks associated with commuting to work under extreme weather conditions.

Keywords: recycling, waste quality, international trade, pollution haven

This paper analyzes international waste trade from the perspective of waste quality. The rapid growth of international waste trade in the last two decades has raised concerns about the less developed countries becoming pollution havens. While the literature has focused on whether to put a total ban on waste trade, China's recent adjustment of quality standard for waste imports greatly influenced the recycling industry throughout the world, showing the power and potential of quality-based waste policies. This paper specifies the waste quality of the traded recyclables. A theoretical model is constructed to analyze the impacts of free trade on not only the quantity but also the quality of the recyclables. Using a North-South trade framework, the model demonstrates that the imbalanced distribution of environmental benefits and costs associated with the recycling industry for different countries is the motivation behind some unilateral quality-based border policies. This paper further examines the implications of quality-based policies and derive the optimal choice of its stringency.

Keywords: electricity consumption, electrical appliances, developing countries

This paper explains energy consumption growth patterns in developing countries by household electrical appliance ownership. The developing world is exceeding developed countries in carbon emission. China and India rank the largest and the fourth largest in carbon emissions in the world, and the growth of emissions from these two countries is still among the fastest. One challenge in predicting energy consumption and setting mitigation goals for developing countries is that energy use does not increase proportionally with the income growth - the growth begins slowly and is followed by a burst in energy consumption, which then slows down again. This paper constructs a theoretical model to investigate the relationship between household electrical appliance acquisition and household energy consumption. The model ascribes the burst in electricity consumption to a period when the income level of households reaches the level that allows them to acquire electrical appliances for the first time. The theoretical predictions are further validated empirically using the survey data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS).