ARE PhD students Will Troske and Ignacio Oliva each presented ongoing work, titled "Global warming, inequality, and dependence on the environment" and "The Behavioral Impact of Sulfur Fuel Content Regulations in Maritime Shipping" respectively. 

Will's work examines how pollution regulation changes firm behavior in the maritime shipping industry. Location-based regulations offer unclear incentives for compliance. Emission Control Areas (ECAs) locally regulate pollutants in maritime shipping. While ECA reduced allowed pollutants, the mobile nature of ships makes the response to the regulation unclear. Will's project aims to understand how ships complied with the ECA using a model of firm entry and exit to estimate pricing impacts for the domestic shipping market.

Ignacio's work examines how integrated assessment models of climate economics can tell us about how regions differentially benefit from natural capital endowments, and how this will change under future climate scenarios. Climate change affects welfare through several channels. In this paper, Ignacio and coauthors study the effects of climate-driven environmental decline on welfare across countries and regions. They integrate natural capital in a global climate-economy model with a fine level of inequality. Because of economic inequalities, low-income groups rely more on ecosystem services and lack affordable manufactured substitutes if these natural services decay. Early results show that environmental loss increases global differences in welfare. The uneven distribution of natural capital endowments and inequality aversion are the leading causes explaining these disparities. These findings suggest that the welfare benefits of climate policies can be globally redistributive when we consider natural capital.