Anouck Daubree and Pierre Beaucoral (CERDI, UCA)

12 PM: The impact of equal remuneration for work of equal value law on total tax revenues

Anouck will present the following ongoing work where investigates the impact of enacting a law mandating equal remuneration for work of same value on total tax revenues excluding natural resources. Exploiting variation of adoption dates of this law across 190 economies for the period 1970-2023, she implements the event-study estimator of de Chaisemartin and D’Haultfoeuille (2024). She finds a positive and significant effect of passing the law on total tax revenues at a medium-term horizon.

Anouck Daubrée is a PhD candidate at CERDI, where she works under the supervision of Grégoire Rota-Graziosi. Her research interests include taxation, fiscal policy, and gender. 

https://theses.fr/s400668

12.45 PM: Maladaptation by Displacement: Spatial Spillovers of Adaptation Finance in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: Adaptation finance is the international community's main policy answer to climate risk in Sub-Saharan Africa, with annual commitments now in the tens of billions. The IPCC warns that adaptation interventions can backfire via protecting one place by shifting environmental pressure and social tension onto its neighbours. Yet, this "maladaptation" has never been measured at scale. Combining geocoded adaptation projects from the GODAD database (machine-classified to select adaptation finance) with two decades of satellite and conflict data, we build a 10 km grid panel covering 8,907 treated cells across Sub-Saharan Africa, matched to comparable untreated locations on the continent, and trace effects from the project site outward through concentric rings up to 100 km. The pattern is one of displacement rather than improvement. Adaptation projects reorganise both local economic activity and the geography of land use: cropland contracts at the project site, economic activity, measured by night-time lights, hollows out in the surrounding rings, and bare ground recedes in the most distant ones. This reshuffling of livelihoods and land creates friction, and conflict follows it: battles, political violence, and violence against civilians all rise in those same rings, with state-perpetrated violence against civilians increasing two- to three-fold, while protests are suppressed at the project site itself. Vegetation and drought show no improvement anywhere. The results give empirical content to the IPCC's maladaptation concept and imply that adaptation finance needs spatial safeguards: evaluating projects only at their own location misses where the costs land.

Pierre Beaucoral is a PhD candidate at Université Clermont Auvergne. He works at CERDI under the supervision of Michaël Goujon and Sébastien Marchand. His research interests include climate finance, spatial data analysis, machine learning and causal inference, and text analysis. 

https://theses.fr/s370798