(Forthcoming Article) - Many environmental hazards have long-run health effects, but quasi-experimental studies typically measure outcomes and treatment over short time periods. We develop a new framework for quantifying the effect of air pollution exposure on life expectancy. Using daily changes in wind direction as an instrument for air pollution, we first charac- terize the dynamic mortality effects of short-run exposure. We then incorporate these estimates into a demographic model to quantify the lifelong effects of a permanent re- duction in air pollution exposure. Ninety percent of the survival benefits accrue after the first fifty years of life.

(Forthcoming Article) - This paper analyzes difference-in-differences designs with a continuous treatment. We show that treatment-on-the-treated-type parameters are identified under a parallel trends assumption analogous to the binary treatment case. However, comparing these parameters across treatments is challenging because parallel trends does not rule out selection bias. We discuss alternative, typically stronger, assumptions that eliminate selection bias. We further show that popular two-way fixed effects estimands admit multiple interpretations, depending on the underlying causal building block, all having important limitations as meaningful summaries of treatment effects. Finally, we introduce alternative estimation procedures that avoid these drawbacks and demonstrate them in an empirical application.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

(Forthcoming Article) - We introduce an empirical framework for valuing markets in environmental offsets. Using newly-collected data on wetland conservation and offsets, we apply this framework to evaluate a set of decentralized markets in Florida, where land developers purchase offsets from long-lived producers who restore wetlands over time. We find that offsets led to substantial private gains from trade, creating $2.4 billion of net surplus from 1995–2020 relative to direct conservation. Offset trading also generated new hydrological externalities. A locally differentiated Pigouvian tax would have prevented $1.6 billion of new flood damage while preserving more than two-thirds of the private gains from trade.

(Forthcoming Article) - What is the impact and value of hurricane forecasts? We study this question using the universe of landfalling US hurricanes between 2005–2022. We find that forecasts drive adaptive protective expenditures, and that erroneous underforecasts result in a significant increase in total hurricane damage. Using a theoreticallygrounded approach for estimating the marginal value of forecast improvements, we find that improvements since 2007, after the implementation of a national policy to improve hurricane forecasts, have reduced total costs by 19%, averaging $2 billion per hurricane. These benefits far exceed the annual budget of the policy and of all federal weather forecasting.

The near-extinction of vultures in India has had severe consequences.

<div> <span>Lethal control is a common intervention in response to human-wildlife conflict, yet its effectiveness in reducing future conflict is unclear. We as

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

This week’s collection features new research household food security and maternal dietary diversity in Ethiopia, evaluating large-scale government investments in fertilizer adoption, the impact of ran...

(Forthcoming Article) - Civic externalities motivate education expenditures, but estimates of the civic returns to large-scale education subsidies are scarce. We use 16 million financial aid applicati...