Job Market Paper · Under Review · Structural Change and Economic Dynamics
Fossil Fuel Underpricing Blocks Disaster-Induced Structural Transformation: Evidence from Carbon-Intensive Global Value Chains
Uke, O. D.
Using a country-sector-year panel of 77 countries, 18 manufacturing sectors, and seven years (2016–2022) under triple fixed effects, I find that the output response of carbon-intensive sectors to climate disasters varies systematically with fossil-fuel underpricing, in the direction predicted by a cost-buffer mechanism. The marginal effect of a climate disaster on high-carbon GVC output flips sign at an underpricing threshold of 1.845% of GDP (68.5th percentile), and 31.5% of country-sector-year cells sit above it. The pattern concentrates in fossil-fuel exporters, non-high-income countries, and weak-governance settings, and the result holds in all 77 leave-one-country-out estimates.
Revise and Resubmit · International Review of Financial Analysis
Riding the Climate Wave: A Wavelet Analysis of Sovereign Risk in Developed and Developing Economies
Uke, O. D., Ben Amar, A., Gorelkina, O.
Which dimension of climate risk do sovereign credit markets price, physical exposure or the capacity to adapt? Using 59 economies (28 advanced, 31 EMDE) over 2008–2021, wavelet coherence shows co-movement between climate vulnerability and CDS spreads across short, medium and low frequencies, neither concentrated in the long horizon nor systematically different between advanced economies and EMDEs. In the cross-section the vulnerability gradient vanishes once development is controlled: what is priced is readiness. For EMDEs, closing the readiness gap relative to advanced economies is associated with about 74% smaller spreads, net of income, public debt and governance. We also document and correct a measurement convention that inflates conventional coherence summaries.
Submitted · Economic Modelling
Climate Shocks and Food Manufacturing: Propagation, Persistence, and Structural Change in the United Kingdom
Uke, O. D., Ben Amar, A., Gorelkina, O.
Presented at the 3rd QFDAM Conference, Rabat, June 2026. Using UK quarterly data for 1990–2025, we separate primary agriculture from downstream food manufacturing and combine a VARX baseline with time-varying local projections with stochastic volatility. A one-standard-deviation temperature shock raises agricultural output by about 1.1%, while food-manufacturing estimates turn negative, peaking near −0.24% and staying negative for three years, though not individually significant at conventional levels. The time-varying estimates show food manufacturing’s domestic climate sensitivity weakening from the late 2010s, consistent with UK food-import dependence rising from 38% to over 50%. Measured domestic temperature sensitivity has shifted upstream to farming.
Submitted · Energy Policy
Fiscal Capacity, Not Climate Exposure: Decomposing Global Fossil-Fuel Underpricing and Its Equity Burden
Uke, O. D., Gorelkina, O., Ben Amar, A.
Only Sweden, Norway and Finland price carbon above zero once subsidies are netted out; the mean effective carbon price across 174 countries is −$88 per tonne of CO₂. We construct a near-global panel of effective carbon prices for 174 countries (2015–2022) and decompose the underpricing shortfall into a domestic wedge, made up of supply-cost gaps, foregone consumption taxes and local air pollution, and a global climate wedge. Fiscal capacity predicts the domestic wedge, which is roughly two thirds of the total, while no observable state characteristic predicts the climate wedge. Climate vulnerability does not raise deficits directly, yet vulnerability and weak fiscal capacity coincide so closely that the income-normalised burden is about twenty times higher in the most vulnerable quintile. Replication package.
Submitted · World Development
Financial Reach and Household Coping under Climate Shocks: Evidence from Ten African Countries
Uke, O. D., Cort, T. (Yale School of Management)
Harmonised shock-and-coping modules from ten African countries allow a within-household comparison of responses to a covariate climate shock and to an idiosyncratic one. Covariate shocks are associated with a 1.9 to 2.2 percentage-point higher probability of reducing consumption, while idiosyncratic shocks more often trigger asset sales. In the 2018 West African sample, a sender elsewhere in the country is associated with a 4.6 percentage-point smaller shift towards cutting consumption than a same-region sender, and survives administrative-region fixed effects; credit access is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Growing-season rainfall anomalies stay correlated across roughly 254 km, which motivates the reach measure without identifying it. The estimates are associational, and the point is that instrument ownership alone is an incomplete measure of climate resilience: the exposure of the income backing a claim matters alongside the instrument a household holds.
Work in Progress · Target: Business Strategy and the Environment
External Carbon Pricing and Transition Risk in Emerging Markets: Evidence from African Exporters under the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism
Uke, O. D.
On 2025 trade, African exporters face a CBAM liability of EUR 45 million in 2026, rising to EUR 1.80 billion at full phase-in in 2034. The ad valorem equivalent rises with processing stage in all four covered sectors, reaching 48.2% on semi-finished steel against a zero most-favoured-nation tariff, so the mechanism reintroduces the tariff escalation that trade policy removed. Exposure also resolves to individual installations: in several countries one production line carries 88% to 98% of national liability, which makes sovereign and single-firm transition risk the same object. Built from an exporter-by-tariff-line measure combining the Commission's country-specific default values, Eurostat Comext trade at CN8 and the certificate price.
Work in Progress
Does Support Arrive When the Water Does? Financial Adaptation Capacity of Nigerian Non-Farm Enterprises
Uke, O. D.
Carries the covariance logic from households to firms. Event study of continuous flood exposure across five waves of the Nigeria General Household Survey Panel and the high-frequency NLPS rounds around the 2022 floods, combined with a planned enterprise survey in the Anambra River basin.
Work in Progress
Sovereign Climate Risk and Corporate Bond Spreads: Evidence from Emerging Markets
Uke, O. D., Santos, L. (COPPE, UFRJ)
Panel of 30 emerging markets and roughly 8,000 corporate bonds (2018–2024); fixed effects and instrumental variables; implications for IFRS S1 and S2 climate disclosure standards. Developed under the joint doctoral agreement with COPPE, UFRJ.
Thesis Chapter
Building Resilience, Reducing Risk: A Systematic Review of Climate Resilience, Climate Finance Impacts, and Market Mispricing in the Global South
Uke, O. D., Ben Amar, A., Gorelkina, O.
A PRISMA-based systematic literature review consolidating the relationship between climate resilience initiatives, financial risk reduction, and market mispricing in the Global South. Retained as a chapter of the dissertation rather than submitted separately.
Earlier Publications in Soil and Crop Science
From my agronomy training, prior to the doctorate.
Published
Guéablé, Y. K. D., Uke, O. D., et al.
Environmental Sciences Proceedings, 16(1), 18. (2022)
Published
Uke, O. D., & Haliru, M.
Farming and Management, 6, 1–7. (2021)
Published
Yusuf, Y. M., Bagudo, H. A., & Uke, O. D.
Journal of Current Opinion in Crop Science, 2(2), 155–164. (2021)
