Massive wildlife losses over the past 50 years have brought new urgency to identifying both the drivers of population decline and potential solutions. We provide the first large-scale evidence that air pollution, specifically ozone, is associated with declines in bird abundance in the United...

Species extinctions and ecological degradation are accelerating to a degree unprecedented in human history. We present causal evidence on the economic drivers of biodiversity loss using a novel panel dataset on the types and quantities of wildlife at thousands of locations across the U.S. from...

Regulatory efforts to reduce public hazards could be undermined when agents respond strategically to enforcement. This paper quantifies changes in road safety from a national safety inspection regulation for commercial vehicles over the past two decades, analyzes the causes of those changes, and...

This paper measures the impact of housing price changes on household consumption at the city level using the universe of credit and debit card transactions in China from 2011 to 2013. In sharp contrast to the literature on the U.S. housing market, our analysis shows a large and negative housing...

We study how air pollution impacts the U.S. labor market by analyzing effects of drifting wildfire smoke that can affect populations far from the fires themselves. We link satellite smoke plume with labor market outcomes to estimate that an additional day of smoke exposure reduces quarterly...

The decade from 2010 to 2019 marked a significant turning point in China’s history of environmental regulation and pollution. This article describes the recent trends in air and water quality, with a focus on the five years since China declared a “war on pollution” in 2014. It summarizes...

Many human activities can be strategically timed around forecastable natural hazards to mute their impacts. We study air pollution shock mitigation in a high-stakes healthcare setting: hospital surgery scheduling. Using newly available inpatient surgery records from a major city in China, we...