Jiameng Zheng, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness at Louisiana State University, will give the talk "Resilient or scarred? Mortality and morbidity after natural disasters," at noon on Wednesday, Oct. 28, in 157 Hosler Building on Penn State's University Park campus.
The event is part of a fall seminar series hosted by the Initiative for Energy and Environmental Economics and Policy (EEEPI). The talk is free and open to the public.
Natural hazards are responsible for significant environmental, structural and economic damages every year. However, the short- and long-term health impacts of these hazards still aren't fully understood. Zheng studies just that.
"We combine spatially detailed disaster footprint and residential location data with administrative claims data to estimate the effects of tornadoes and wildfires on the physical and mental health of elderly and disabled individuals in the United States," Zheng said. "The fine spatial granularity of our data allows us to distinguish individuals living within the disaster footprint from those residing nearby."
The findings suggest significant short-term health impacts that sit outside what would be expected directly from the hazards.
"These impacts are concentrated among disaster-affected individuals experiencing the highest levels of damage and those with pre-existing chronic conditions," Zheng said. "And we found little evidence that these acute health effects extend beyond the disaster footprint or persist beyond a few months."
Zheng's research uses large administrative datasets and causal inference methods to study the socioeconomic impacts of environmental pollution, natural disasters, and environmental and regulatory policies. Her work lies at the intersection of environmental economics, health economics and public economics, with particular interests in environmental health, water-related challenges and policy evaluation. She received her doctorate in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining LSU, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Business and Public Policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research has been published in the Journal of Public Economics, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics and Environmental Science & Technology.
About EEEPI
Established in 2011, EEEPI operates as a University-wide initiative at Penn State with support from the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute and the Institute of Energy and the Environment. EEEPI seeks to catalyze research in energy and environmental systems economics across the University and to build a world-class group of economists with interests in interdisciplinary collaboration.
