Shubham Chaudhuri's research while affiliated with Columbia University and other places

... To the best of our knowledge, such an approach at the household level, where most effective resource use decisions are taken, is not covered in the literature. Pfaff et al. (2004) investigate the relationship between environmental degradation and poverty (the Environmental Kuznets Curve) with an analytical household utility model with consumption and amenity values. In their model households are pure consumers and the amenity value is derived from pure public goods. ...

... Other theoretical contributions to this literature include Selden and Song (1995), who describe a variety of possible pollution-income paths in a dynamic growth model, Chaudhuri and Pfaff (1998b), who posit a particular mechanism, bundled commodities, to explain the environmental Kuznets curve, and Kelly (1999), who focuses on the irreversible nature of many pollution problems as a driving force behind the curve. As Selden and Song (1995) themselves note, 'the complexity of those models can obscure the central forces involved'. ...

... Besides structural effects, behavioural factors that influence individuals' choices on environmental services influence the economic development-environment relationship (Panayotou, 2000). Models developed to study the micro foundations of the EKC show that low income and consumption in combination with increased environmental endowments lead to increasing environmental damage (Murty, 2003;Pfaff, Chaudhuri and Nye, 2004) at least for low incomes. Ma and Shi (2014) using a static model explain that at low-income levels, individuals perceive pollution caused by economic growth as acceptable as they are more concerned with wellbeing stemming from the consumption of produced goods. ...

... The authors Selden and Song (1995); Roca (2003); Pfaff et al. (2004); Figueroa and Pasten (2013) carry out work in this fashion. Another prominent explanation for the EKC comes from scale, technical and composition effects. ...

... As consumers and as citizens, people may be willing to incur costs for cleaner production. For instance, households might on their own invest in stoves (Chaudhuri & Pfaff, 2003;Pfaff et al., 2004aPfaff et al., , 2004b; and many studies cited in World Bank, 2007) to produce cooking, heating and lighting services with far less pollution. This applies in rural areas but also has significant spillovers to ambient air quality within cities. ...

... 4 Many forms of degradation of the environment feature components that are private, and we observe significant private provision of environmental abatement in the absence of regulations. 5 Others have shown that changes in the composition of goods consumed and techniques of production can matter (Copeland and Taylor 1995, Jaeger 1998, Grossman 1995) Still others have focused on single-actor stories about preferences and abatement technologies, which to yield EKC predictions require explicit aggregation through identified mechanisms.(Andreoni and Levinson 2001; Pfaff, Chaudhuri and Nye 2002b, which explicitly models a voting mechanism). 6 See, for instance, John & Pecchenino 1994, Selden & Song 1995, Stokey 1998, Chimeli 2001, and for related work also Plourde 1972, Keeler et al. 1972, D'Arge & Kogiku 1973, Forster 1973, Gruver 1976, Stevens 1976, Asako 1980, Becker 1982 and Tahvonen & Kuuluvainen 1993 The point of departure for this paper, then, is our claim that whatever the EKC mechanism at work, it ultimately has to be linked back to a theoretically coherent and empirically grounded account of: i) how households' marginal valuations of the environment evolve with increases in household income; and ii) how those views get aggregated up and manifested through the political policy-making process and/or through markets. ...

... In a way, trade could facilitate the use of technologies that lessen carbon intensity of products and production processes and lead countries to change the structure of their production through concentration on less energy-intensive activities with a comparative advantage (Shahbaz et al., 2013), therefore, a negative association amid trade openness and CO 2 emissions. On the other hand, trade openness is likely to lead to increasing CO 2 emissions due to increased economic activity and depletion of natural resources (Chaudhuri & Pfaff, 2002). ...

... For example, Andreoni and Levinson (1998) present a static model that shows that an EKC can be derived from the technological link between consumption of a desired good and the abatement of its undesirable by-product. Pfaff et al. (2001) provide a theoretical framework at the household level, and by focusing on the linkage between income and household choices that impact upon the environment, they show how household-level EKC's can arise. Other theoretical contributions include those of Selden and Song (1995) and Stokey (1998). ...