Andrej Smirnov

Andrej is an economist studying the gendered consequences of climate change in low- and middle-income countries using microdata. His research interests span labor economics, environmental economics, economics of conflict and political economy, drawing primarily on microeconometric and geospatial methods. He is a fourth-year PhD candidate at Nova SBE in Lisbon. Alongside this, he has ongoing projects on vote-buying in Angola and a handbook chapter on incentivizing community health workers.

Before the PhD, Andrej completed an MSc in Economics at Humboldt University Berlin, interned at the EBRD, and worked as a research assistant at the International Security and Development Center (ISDC) and the German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM).

In my current project "Climate Shocks, Gender Norms and Labor Supply" I am examining if gender norms moderate labor supply responses to climate shocks in Egypt, a country with one of the lowest female labor force participation rates worldwide and restrictive gender norms. I do this by combining four waves of ELMPS (2006–2023) with high-resolution ERA5-Land temperature data and estimating fixed effect regressions.

I find that temperature deviations widen the gender gap in labor force participation. Preliminary evidence, however, suggests that more liberal gender norms can moderate the negative impact for women. Intra-household norms (more equal division of chores, investment into children) seem to drive these results. Societal perceptions on female employment seem to have no impact.