We examine the effects of mining booms in Indonesia on labor market outcomes using exogenous price changes and 452 mines. We do this using labor force surveys between the years 1998 and 2011, and four waves of individual panel data between 1997 and 2014. Surprisingly, female incomes grow during mining booms, not because women work more, but because their work moves from the agricultural to the service sector where paid work is more common. Men experience mixed labor market changes. High average mining incomes attract male labor to mining districts, allowing for some adjustment of labor supply to demand. Suggestive evidence also shows that informal work increases marginally for men, potentially in auxiliary mining jobs. A male dominated industry that supports economic opportunities for women can unexpectedly benefit women as well.

With the green, circular, and low-carbon concept, eco-industrial parks are regarded as key drivers for maximizing environmental and economic benefits. Based on the panel data of 276 cities in China from 2007 to 2018, this paper regards the establishment of eco-industrial parks as a quasi-natural experiment, and employs the difference-in-differences method to test the impact of eco-industrial parks on urban haze pollution. We find that eco-industrial parks significantly reduce urban haze pollution and the conclusion holds with robustness tests. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect of eco-industrial parks on haze pollution is more pronounced in eastern and resource-based cities. Finally, mechanism analysis indicates that eco-industrial parks reduce urban haze pollution mainly by promoting technological innovation, upgrading industrial structure, and strengthening urban environmental regulations.

We use childhood exposure to disasters as a natural experiment inducing variations in adulthood outcomes. Following the fetal origin hypothesis, we hypothesize that children from households with greater famine exposure will have poorer health outcomes. Employing a unique dataset from Bangladesh, we test this hypothesis for the 1974–75 famine that was largely caused by increased differences between the price of coarse rice and agricultural wages, together with the lack of entitlement to foodgrains for daily wage earners. People from northern regions of Bangladesh were unequally affected by this famine that spanned several months in 1974 and 1975. We find that children surviving the 1974–75 famine have lower health outcomes during their adulthood. Due to the long-lasting effects of such adverse events and their apparent human capital and growth implications, it is important to enact and enforce public policies aimed at ameliorating the immediate harms of such events through helping the poor.

The impact of cyclones on assets and sales of manufacturing firms in India is examined econometrically using data on manufacturing companies for 2008–2019. We find that there is about a 4–6 per cent dip in sales and a 2–3 per cent dip in total assets of manufacturing firms following a cyclone incident in the district where the firms' plants are located. The fall in sales is bigger for relatively small-sized firms. For multi-plant firms with plants in different states, which are relatively bigger firms, the impact may be small or even negligible. By contrast, cyclones cause a fall in total assets for both big and small firms. The adverse effect of cyclones on sales and assets of manufacturing firms is relatively less for firms with a high trade-technology orientation. We also find that cyclones significantly raise the risk of business failure among manufacturing plants, more so among small plants.