Lab Seminar: Sandy Sum and Fabiana Natali

This week, ARE postdoc Sandy Sum and ARE PhD student Fabiana Natali each presented their ongoing work.

Sandy's work focuses on the health impacts of agricultural water scarcity. As water scarcity intensifies due to drought and conservation policies, an unprecedented amount of agricultural land will go fallow, carrying profound implications for public health in nearby communities. Water scarcity-driven land agricultural land transitions introduces opposing pathways influencing air quality and respiratory health. Reduced agricultural activity is expected to decrease air pollution from chemical applications and equipment emissions, while crop fallowing is likely to increase airborne particulate matter (PM) through windblown dust emissions from exposed soil. Sandy's research aims to assess the impacts of agricultural fallowing on air pollution and respiratory morbidity in California’s Central Valley (CCV), a region burdened with some of the worst air pollution in the nation. She focuses on isolating the health impacts from fallowing-driven dust emissions, as more exact quantification can help inform proactive state-level land repurposing programs such as habitat restoration or cover cropping. 

Fabiana's research focuses on whether common reduced form econometric tools can identify causal effects in coupled human-natural systems. Marine protected areas have been established and promoted worldwide, prompting questions about their effects on commercial fisheries. Recent empirical studies leverage DiD designs and related methods to identify the sign and magnitude of these effects, though violations of core assumptions can bias results. In this work, Fabiana aims to provide evidence on how such violations bias the estimation process and propose alternative strategies to ensure the internal and external validity of these estimates.