Three Essays in Development Economics

This dissertation examines how environmental shocks influence household behavior and health in data-poor settings across the Global South. The first essay evaluates the validity of a novel harmonized nightlights dataset as a proxy for local economic activity across 34 sub-Saharan African countries. The second essay uses quarterly household data, combined with high-resolution climate indices, to identify the causal effect of droughts and floods on rural coping strategies in 24 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. The third essay investigates whether deforestation driven by large-scale land acquisitions affects child health, integrating geocoded DHS surveys with annual forest loss data across nine sub-Saharan African countries and applying the extended two way fixed effects estimator to address staggered treatment timing.