GraSPP Research Seminar
A common theme in the vast literature on climate change is the use of historical data to estimate models that make predictions many decades into the future. Although there are many such studies, researchers rarely return later to assess the accuracy of their predictions. In this paper, they perform such an exercise. Davis and Gertler (2015) used household-level microdata from Mexico to predict future air conditioning adoption as a function of income and temperature. Revisiting these predictions with 12 years of additional data, they find that air conditioning in Mexico has accelerated significantly, exceeding our predictions. Neither errors in predicting income growth nor rising temperatures, nor migration patterns, nor an overly restrictive model can explain the large prediction gap. Instead, our results point to the failure to account for falling electricity prices and technological changes in air conditioner efficiency as key drivers of the prediction gap.
Date & Time:
9:30-11:15, Thursday, December 4, 2025
*The seminar will be held online*
Speaker:
Lucas DAVIS
Distinguished Professor, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
Coordinator: Dr. Stacey H. Chen (GraSPP, UTokyo)
Registration:
Pre-registration is required: Registration Form