Shweta Bhogale, postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will give the talk, "Run on the Reservoir: Evidence on Administrative Competition for Groundwater in India," at noon on Wednesday, Feb. 12, in 157 Hosler Building at Penn State University Park.
"Groundwater aquifers are predicted to run dry by the 2050s in parts of the United States, southern Europe and India," Bhogale said. "I study whether administrative jurisdictions in India exacerbate the standard tragedy of the commons problem for groundwater through the policies they implement and if this impedes adaptation to scarcity by influencing the decisions of individuals and nested governments."
Bhogale uses a difference-in-differences framework that relies on the overlap of groundwater resources with districts, and the permeability of aquifers, which facilitates spillovers across borders. She said she finds that policy spending in districts that compete more for groundwater escalates the dependence on groundwater irrigation, aggravating negative externalities. In the long term, competitively shared groundwater resources experience depletion and defunct wells. Lastly, she will discuss evidence for district competition inhibiting public investments to ameliorate groundwater scarcity within villages.
Bhogale is a postdoctoral fellow at Jameel Poverty Action Lab's King Climate Action Initiative at MIT and a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy. Her research interests lie at the intersection of environmental and resource economics, development economics and political economy. In particular, her work spans natural resource management including groundwater and clean air, climate adaptation, innovation in agriculture and rural development.
Bhogale holds a doctorate from Harvard University in public policy, a master of arts degree in international and development economics from Yale University and a bachelor of arts degree in economics and statistics from St. Xavier's College in Mumbai, India.
The Initiative for Energy and Environmental Economics and Policy (EEEPI) was established in 2011 with the goal of promoting policy-relevant economics research that lies at the boundary between economic sciences and the study of natural or engineered systems. The EEEPI initiative is focused primarily on the union between energy systems and environmental management and the development of quantitative tools to address decision challenges in these areas. View more information on EEEPI.
