Organizer: Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
Type/Location: Hybrid / Canberra, Australia
Description:
Pyan Amin Muchtar will present his second PhD paper on how air pollution and heat affect digital consumers’ demand on online ride-hailing and food delivery in Indonesia.
This paper examines how consumer demand for app-based services is affected by short-term environmental shocks, specifically air pollution and heat. Using transaction-level data from Indonesia’s leading ride-hailing and food delivery platforms, we link daily user activity to high-frequency environmental measurements from a dense network of air quality sensors in Jakarta. To address potential endogeneity in pollution exposure, we implement a well-established instrumental variable strategy using plausibly exogenous variation in wind direction. We find that higher levels of particulate matter (PM2.5) significantly reduce spending on app-based services, driven by declines in both the likelihood and intensity of transactions. Heat shocks produce smaller but consistent effects. We document heterogeneity in response across different types of users. We further investigate users’ behavior with respect to healthy food choices and ride-hailing convenience and mode selection. Our findings offer new insights into how digital consumption patterns are shaped by climate-related stressors in urban settings.
About the Speaker:
Pyan Amin Muchtar is a PhD candidate in Economics at the Australian National University. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics from the University of Amsterdam and a Bachelor’s degree from Universitas Indonesia. His broad research interests include development economics, environmental economics, and the digital economy, with a regional focus on Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He has extensive research and policy experience with international organizations and research institutes, including ERIA, the World Bank, and LPEM-UI, and has contributed to academic publications, policy analysis, and teaching at the university level.
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