The rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent countermeasures, such as school closures, the shift to working from home, and social distancing are disrupting economic activity around the world. As with other major economic shocks, there are winners and losers, leading to increased...

The COVID-19 pandemic created unexpected and prolonged disruptions to childcare access. Using survey evidence on time use by academic researchers before and after the pandemic, we analyze the extent to which greater access to either school-based or partner-provided childcare mitigated the severe...

We study the dynamics of residential electricity demand by exploiting a natural experiment that produced large and long-lasting price changes in over 250 Illinois communities. Using a flexible difference-in-differences matching approach, we estimate that the price elasticity of demand grows from...

It is widely hypothesized that incomes in wealthy countries are insulated from environmental conditions because individuals have the resources needed to adapt to their environment. We test this idea in the wealthiest economy in human history. Using within-county variation in weather, we estimate...

We estimate the causal effects of acute fine particulate matter exposure on mortality, health care use, and medical costs among the US elderly using Medicare data and a novel instrument for air pollution: changes in local wind direction. We develop a new approach that uses machine learning to...

We follow Medicare cohorts to estimate Hurricane Katrina's long-run mortality effects on victims initially living in New Orleans. Including the initial shock, the hurricane improved eight-year survival by 2.07 percentage points. Migration to lower-mortality regions explains most of this survival...

Using novel US environmental spill data, we document a robust negative relationship between the number of spills a firm experiences in a given year and its contemporaneous and lagged (but not future) cash flow. In addition, studying two natural experiments, we find an increase (decrease) in...

Little is known about the fiscal costs of natural disasters, especially regarding social safety nets that do not specifically target extreme weather events. This paper shows that US hurricanes lead to substantial increases in non-disaster government transfers, such as unemployment insurance and...

COVID-19 has created a dual set of stresses on health care systems worldwide: a rise in expensive intensive care services and a dramatic decline in elective services. The U.S. government has responded with both grant and loan programs to help health care providers weather the storm. But the...

Policies aimed at reducing the harmful effects of air pollution exposure typically focus on areas with high levels of pollution. However, if a population's vulnerability to air pollution is imperfectly correlated with current pollution levels, then this approach to air quality regulation may not...