This dissertation consists of three essays that examine the impact of environmental shocks on critical economic and social outcomes. The first chapter investigates how natural disasters affect defaults on legal financial obligations (LFOs). Using a novel dataset of traffic citations from Oklahoma and a regression discontinuity design, I find that disaster exposure increases the likelihood of failing to pay or appear in court by 4 percentage points. This effect is substantially larger for less wealthy and non-White defendants, exacerbating existing disparities in the criminal justice system. The evidence suggests that liquidity constraints, rather than cognitive burdens, drive these defaults, which in turn lead to more arrests, contributing to a ”pipeline-to-prison” effect. The second chapter, co-authored with Jafar Jafarov and Soham Sahoo, explores how air pollution alters time-use patterns in India. Employing an instrumental variable strategy that leverages plausibly exogenous variation in wind direction, we find that a one standard deviation increase in %"2.5 concentration reducestime spent outdoors by 8 minutes. This decline is driven by a reduction in outdoor employment, with the saved time reallocated primarily to indoor leisure. This avoidance behavior is concentrated among more flexible workers like the self-employed and casual laborers, who can afford to forgo income. We also find that on more polluted days, the male share of unpaid care activities increases, suggesting a shift toward more equitable intrahousehold task distribution. The third chapter assesses the impact of contemporaneous malaria exposure on student achievement in Tanzania. By linking students longitudinally across two high-stakes primary school exams and using a student fixed-effects model, I find that a one standard deviation increase in the local malaria positivity rate in the month of the exam worsens student performance by 0.029 standard deviations. Mechanism analysis suggests this is driven by students missing school to care for sick household members. Collectively, these essays highlight the significant and often unequal costs of environmental stressors.