Essays on Aviation, Infrastructure, and Sustainable Development

This dissertation seeks to better understand the sustainable development of aviation and infrastructure. The first essay uses an instrumental variable approach to examine aviation's impact on regional economic outcomes and innovation. Using a novel set of instruments based on the historical institutional and physical requirements for expanded air connectivity, I find that a 1% increase in a core-based statistical area's Global Connectivity Index is associated with an increase in long-term total personal income by 1.7% and 6 more granted patents. The second essay provides a new first-cut estimate of climate change impacts on aviation through increased severe thunderstorm activity. As a result of projected increases in Convective Available Potential Energy due to global warming, there is growing consensus that severe thunderstorm environments will increase in the United States. Using domestic air traffic delay data from 2004-2017 with the registered storm events database from the National Centers for Environmental Information, I find that the estimated annual cost of additional delays under a RCP4.5 scenario would be in the order of 152.4 million dollars in the spring and 298.3 million dollars in the summer. The third essay is devoted to energy infrastructure in India, where it studies the social acceptability of electricity theft using a conjoint experiment with 1800 households. Consistent with hypothesis, the income and electricity supply contexts of hypothetical offenders affect the social acceptability of electricity theft.