This dissertation investigates how climate change interacts with informal institutional structures to shape economic inequalities in developing countries, with a particular focus on India. Growing evidence suggests that slow-onset climate events, such as rising temperatures, are undermining agricultural productivity in developing and least developed countries. These countries face an adaptation gap, where populations lack the resources to adapt, and governments lack the capacity to support effective adaptation.
A central argument of this dissertation is that informal institutions—such as concentrated land ownership patterns, caste-based hierarchies, and gender customs and norms—play a critical role in determining both exposure to climate change and access to adaptation options. India serves as the empirical setting due to the coexistence of strong, persistent informal institutions and high vulnerability to climate change.
The dissertation is structured around three core chapters. The first chapter provides a systematic review of 81 studies on slow-onset climate change events, agricultural adaptation, and migration in low-income settings, highlighting how landholding patterns and institutional constraints differentially shape migration decisions.
The second chapter empirically examines how rising temperatures affect women’s marriage-related migration in rural India, identifying the dowry custom as a key mechanism through which declining agricultural yields constrain women’s marriage migration to urban areas and limit their likelihood of attaining better standards of living.
The third chapter empirically analyzes how rising temperatures influence gendered labor reallocation in rural India, showing that women stay confined to the agricultural sector while men transition to non-agricultural work. These patterns are most pronounced in areas with high shares of historically land-poor Scheduled Caste populations at the baseline.
The dissertation contributes to the development economics literature by demonstrating that long-run temperature increases interact with persistent informal institutions to produce heterogeneous and adverse economic effects. It also advances demographic and gender economics literature by documenting how climate change reshapes migration patterns, marriage markets, and the gender composition of rural labor forces. Overall, the dissertation argues that climate change in developing countries cannot be understood without accounting for the institutional structures that deepen existing inequalities and reshape economic outcomes.
