When the Dust Settles: Productivity and Economic Losses Following Dust Storms [Job Market Paper] (with Kowser Yousefi), (paper is available upon request)
Work in Progress:
Dust and Mortality Rate: Evidence from the Middle East
This paper provides evidence on impact of dust storms on mortality rates in Iran. I exploit random year-to-year variation in dust exposure across counties in Iran over a 10-year period to identify the impact. Using all-cause mortality data from all counties, I highlight the vulnerability of people with few resources and fragile health to dust storms. My findings suggest that mortality rates increase significantly in response to dust storms. I estimate that an additional day of dust storm in a year increases mortality rate by 0.15% nationwide. Furthermore, I investigate differential impacts across different age groups. I find that infants and the elderly (people above 60 years of age) are the groups most sensitive to dust exposure. The mortality data contains cause of death information as well. I document that across different causes of death, respiratory, cardiovascular and cancer related issues are the main causes associated with death in response to dust storms.
Manufacturers Acting as Intermediaries (with Parisa Kamali)
An increasing majority of manufacturing firms export products that they do not produce. In other words, firms act as intermediary for their suppliers to help their products reach new markets. Using a novel panel survey of manufacturing firms located in Spain we find that on average 19% of sales of manufacturing firms are from sourced products not produced by them. Our data suggests that larger (by firm size and sales) and more productive firms have higher proportions of sales from sourced products. We also find that firms that source, reach more distant markets for both export and import. We propose a general equilibrium model capable of generating predictions consistent with these empirical findings. The novelty of our model is in allowing the firms to be both producers and intermediaries at the same time. Our results highlight that an exporter’s ability to reach foreign markets may depend not just on tariffs applied to the firm’s product, but on the tariffs applied to products of manufacturers that supply their input from the firm.