The dissertation investigates how climate change interacts with long-standing institutional structures to shape economic inequalities in developing countries, with a particular focus on India. It is motivated by growing evidence that the slow-onset events of climate change, such as rising temperatures, are harming agricultural and labor productivity, and economic growth potential in developing and least developed countries. These countries face an “adaptation gap”, where populations lack the resources to adapt autonomously, and governments often lack the capacity to support effective adaptation.
A central theme of the dissertation is the role of informal institutions, often regressive, that are pervasive in these countries in influencing both exposure to climate change and access to adaptation options. These informal institutions, many of which have persisted across generations, shape who owns land, who can migrate, who can access credit, and who can take up nonagricultural opportunities. Thus, the unifying theme of the dissertation is the role of social and informal institutions, such as concentrated land ownership patterns, caste-based hierarchies, and gender norms, in shaping the economic effects of climate change.
The empirical chapters of the thesis focus on India as a case study due to the coexistence of strong, persistent informal institutions and high vulnerability to climate change, which together make India a compelling empirical setting for investigating how informal institutional structures shape the differential effects of climate change.
The dissertation is structured around three core chapters. Chapter 2 provides a systematic review of 81 studies on slow-onset climate change, agricultural adaptation, and migration in low-income settings, emphasizing how landholding patterns and institutional constraints differentially shape migration decisions across groups. Chapter 3 examines how rising temperatures affect women’s marriage-related migration in rural India. This chapter highlights the dowry custom in India as a key mechanism through which rising temperatures and consequent declines in agricultural yields are constraining women’s migration to urban areas and limiting their access to better opportunities.
Chapter 4 analyzes how rising temperatures influence gendered labor reallocation in rural India. This chapter shows that women are increasingly stuck in the agricultural sector, while men are moving into non-agricultural sectors. Interestingly, these patterns are most pronounced in regions with a high proportion of women belonging to India’s backward caste communities, specifically the Scheduled Caste (SC) communities that have historically been land-poor. This suggests that as temperatures rise and agricultural productivity declines, landless male laborers can leave to seek wage work elsewhere, while landless female laborers are left behind and experience falling wages. Qualitative fieldwork highlights the normative barriers that restrict women’s sectoral mobility.
The dissertation makes critical contributions to development economics literature. Substantively, it shows that long-run temperature increases interact with persistent informal institutions in developing countries to produce heterogeneous, and often adverse, economic effects, and adds an important climate-related channel to the literature on institutions and development. It also contributes to the field of demographic and gender economics by documenting how climate change reshapes migration patterns, marriage markets, and the gender composition of rural labor forces.
Overall, the dissertation demonstrates that climate change in developing countries cannot be understood without considering the institutional structures in these countries. It advances our understanding of how climate change, when interacting with institutional structures, can deepen existing inequalities and reshape economic outcomes.
