The conversion of brown office buildings to green apartments can contribute towards a solution to three pressing issues: oversupply of office in a hybrid-and-remote-work world, shortage of housing, and excessive greenhouse gas emissions. We propose a set of criteria to identify commercial office...

Land-use changes involve important economic and environmental effects with implications for international trade, global climate change, wildlife, and other policy issues. We use an econometric model to identify factors driving land-use change in the United States between 1982 and 1997. We...

We quantify the U.S. corporate sector's carbon externality by computing the sector's "carbon burden"--the present value of social costs of its future carbon emissions. Our baseline estimate of the carbon burden is 131% of total corporate equity value. Among individual firms, 77% have carbon...

We develop a new revealed preference framework to estimate the value of statistical life (VSL). Our framework starts from a hedonic model of health care in which heterogenous individuals choose how much to spend on medical services that reduce mortality risk. Their choices generate an...

The Random Utility Model (RUM) is a workhorse model for valuing new products or changes in public goods. But RUMs have been faulted along two lines. First, for including idiosyncratic errors that imply unreasonably high values for new alternatives and unrealistic substitution patterns. Second,...

This paper provides the first estimates of the contemporaneous effect of drinking water quality violations on students' academic achievement. Using student-level test score data with residential addresses, geographic information on water systems, and drinking water violations from North...

Although at least 400 million people suffer from seasonal allergies worldwide, the adverse effects of pollen on "non-health" outcomes, such as cognition and productivity, are relatively understudied. Using ambulance archives from Japan, we demonstrate that high pollen days are associated with...

Multiple price lists are a convenient tool to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) in surveys and experiments, but choice patterns such as "multiple switching" and "never switching" indicate high error rates. Existing measurement approaches often do not provide accurate standard errors and cannot...

We study the relationship between water nutrient pollution and U.S. agriculture using data between the early 1970s and late 2010s. We estimate a positive causal effect of corn acreage on nitrogen concentration in the country's water bodies using alternative empirical approaches. We find that a...