Sustainable Development Doctoral Society
at Columbia University in the City of New York
February 18, 2011 Climate Change and its Social Consequences
Project by Prabhat Barnwal: This study examines the effects of temperature and precipitation on mean and variance of seasonal rice yield in Andhra Pradesh, India. Two distinct approaches are employed: stochastic production function and quantile regression. The findings suggest adverse…
Read more
February 18, 2011 Political Economy of Sustainable Development
Project by Jose Carlos Orihuela (completed thesis): Journeys inquire why and how mineral-rich Chile and Peru joined in the international trend of good green governance. Behind formal governance convergence hides effective institutional divergence: a relatively strong and autonomous green state…
Read more
February 18, 2011 Health & Infectious Disease
Project by Nicole Ngo: In the planetary boundary layer (PBL) (loosely defined as the layer < 1 km above the surface), pollutants travel smaller distances and have shorter residence times relative to those in the upper troposphere. As a result, understanding…
Read more
February 18, 2011 Health & Infectious Disease
Project by Nicole Ngo: There are few large urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), but the cities in SSA are rapidly expanding. As such, there is increasing concern over urban planning and coping with a growing urban population, including mitigating…
Read more
February 18, 2011 Health & Infectious Disease
Project by Nicole Ngo: There is concern over the public health issues concerning black carbon (BC), a species of particulate matter. One major source of BC in urban areas is vehicles that use diesel, such as trucks or buses. To…
Read more
February 18, 2011 Social and behavioral causes of and solutions to unsustainable development
Project by James Rising: This project is part research and part social entrepreneurship. The goal is to construct a software system that can evaluate the unintended consequences of individual purchases, and match them to charities that ameliorate those specific effects. Using this framework, consumers…
Read more
February 18, 2011 Climate Change and its Social Consequences, Social and behavioral causes of and solutions to unsustainable development
Project by James Rising: The behaviors that produce climate change are overdetermined and systemic, but that fact suggests that there exist “leverage points” within society where small policy changes will have big effects on these behaviors. The goal of this project is to generate…
Read more
February 18, 2011 Climate Change and its Social Consequences, Disasters and Conflict, General, Water Resource Management
Project by James Rising (with Prof. John Mutter): This research has two complementary directions: studying the projected evolution of flood variability in the Himalayan floodplain with respect to glacier melt. What portion of the current flooding along Himalayan rivers is attributable to glacier melt,…
Read more
February 18, 2011 Ecosystem Services, Political Economy of Sustainable Development, Water Resource Management
Project by Xiaojia Bao: This paper initially built a theoretical model for governments’ fiscal response with respect to the distributive impacts of dams along a river basin. The model claimed that upstream counties should get compensated, while downstream counties should…
Read more
February 18, 2011 General, Water Resource Management
Project by Xiaojia Bao: This paper modeled household water use in a water-scarce rural village in Northern China using household level data. Several household characteristics were identified to impact water use significantly. Household size shows a scale-economy effect, with a…
Read more
January 31, 2011 Water Resource Management
Project by Chandra Kiran: There is a vast literature on groundwater management when recharge is stochastic and when demand is known. Given the developed country setting of this literature, there is no corresponding focus on stochastic demand, especially when demand…
Read more
January 31, 2011 Climate Change and its Social Consequences
Project by Chandra Kiran: Using a 25-year panel on more than 300 districts, and newly available gridded climate datasets, we estimate the impact of climate change on Indian agriculture. The effects of random year-to-year variations in weather are used to…
Read more
January 27, 2011 Development Interventions
Project by Anna Tompsett A ‘spine road’ is being constructed in Kibera, a large informal settlement in the center of Nairobi. The road will vastly improve transport access to the settlement. My proposed research project will track a panel of…
Read more
January 27, 2011 General, Water Resource Management
Dealing with spatial and temporal variation in water availability in a data-sparse environment Project by Anna Tompsett The project focuses on an area of the Niger Inland Delta near Tombouctou, Mali, where there is very little data available for water…
Read more
January 27, 2011 Energy Systems, General
Project by Aly Sanoh This paper analysis the optimal options to supply electricity to national economies from both domestic as well as distant resources using transmissions systems across the huge renewable energy resources of Africa. The overarching questions are: How…
Read more
January 27, 2011 Political Economy of Sustainable Development
Project by Aly Sanoh This paper addresses three unresolved questions in the literature of public finance and development. First, it uses exogenous variation in rainfall across municipalities in Mali to estimate the causal effect of household income shocks on municipal…
Read more