Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. To understand the productivity both...

Climate change will increase the risk of temperature extremes. Induced innovation could offset some of this threat. This paper explores the demand and supply for climate adaptation innovation in a market economy. Climate change induces this innovation because the rising temperatures increase...

More than 100 natural disasters strike the United States every year, causing extensive fatalities and damages. We construct the universe of US federally designated natural disasters from 1920 to 2010. We find that severe disasters increase out-migration rates at the county level by 1.5...

This study uses a large sample of homes in the San Diego area and Sacramento, California area to provide some of the first capitalization estimates of the sales value of homes with solar panels relative to comparable homes without solar panels. Although the residential solar home market...

This paper summarizes and synthesizes the role of markets in facilitating climate change adaptation. It explains how market signals encourage adaptation through land markets. It also identifies impediments to critical market signals, provides related policy recommendations, and points to...

High skilled workers gain from face to face interactions. If the skilled can move at higher speeds, then knowledge diffusion and idea spillovers are likely to reach greater distances. This paper uses the construction of China's high speed rail (HSR) network as a natural experiment to test this...

The quality of governance depends on public sector worker productivity. We use micro data from China to document that judges are less productive on polluted days. Building on the insights of Alchian and Kessel (1962), we discuss the role of organization design and the incentives of public versus...

We present a three-stage estimation procedure to recover willingness to pay for housing attributes. In the first stage, we estimate a non-parametric hedonic home price function. Second, we recover each consumer's taste parameters for product characteristics using first order conditions for...

The rise of the dual career household is a recent phenomenon spurred by the increase in married women's labor force participation rates and educational attainment rates. Compared to traditional households these households must solve a colocation problem. This paper documents trends in locational...

We present the first nation wide value of life estimates for the United States at more than one point in time. Our estimates are for every ten years between 1940 and 1980, a period when declines in fatal accident rates were historically unprecedented. Our estimated elasticity of value of life...