Detecting and Quantifying Structural Breaks in Climate
Abstract
Structural breaks have attracted considerable attention over the last decade, particularly in light of the financial crisis and Great Recession. While structural breaks pose significant econometric challenges, recent developments have provided incisive tools for detecting and quantifying breaks. The current paper presents a unified framework for analyzing breaks; and it implements that framework to test for and quantify changes in precipitation in Mauritania over 1919-1997. These tests detect a decline of approximately one third in mean rainfall, starting around 1970. Because water is a scarce resource in Mauritania, this decline--with adverse consequences on food production--has potential economic and policy consequences.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMGC23A..02E
- Keywords:
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- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1986 Statistical methods: Inferential;
- INFORMATICSDE: 6304 Benefit-cost analysis;
- POLICY SCIENCESDE: 6615 Legislation and regulations;
- PUBLIC ISSUES