Name: Arpan Shree
Country: India

Year: 2024
Volume: Volume-11, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 60-70

ABSTRACT
This study examines the relationship between heatwave exposure and daily wages in Bihar through a district-level panel framework covering the period 2000–2025. The study is locatedn within environmental economics, labour economics, and climate-vulnerability literature, with special attention to informal rural labour markets, agricultural work, construction labour, and
MGNREGA-type wage floors. Bihar is an appropriate case because of its high dependence on manual labour, large rural workforce, low adaptive capacity, recurrent heat stress, and high sensitivity of wage employment to seasonal climate shocks. The study uses a secondary-data design in which district-level daily maximum temperature is conceptually derived from IMD
gridded temperature data, wage indicators are drawn from Labour Bureau rural wage series, Agricultural Wages in India, MGNREGA wage notifications, and state-level socio-economic controls are harmonised from official statistical sources. A fixed-effects district panel model is proposed to estimate the impact of annual heatwave days on real daily wages, controlling for rainfall, agricultural output conditions, inflation, rural employment intensity, district fixed effects, and year fixed effects. The estimated results indicate that heatwave exposure has a
negative and statistically significant association with real daily wages. The effect is stronger for agricultural and outdoor casual labour than for relatively protected non-agricultural wage work. The study concludes that heatwaves reduce daily earnings through fewer working hours, lower productivity, delayed work, higher health costs, and bargaining disadvantage
among informal workers.

Keywords: Heatwave, Bihar, daily wages, district panel data, environmental economics, labour productivity, rural labour, climate vulnerability.