This paper examines the application of quasi-experimental methods in environmental economics. We begin with two observations: i) standard quasi-experimental methods, first applied in other microeconomic fields, typically assume unit-level treatments that do not spill over across units; (ii)...

Market-based environmental policies are widely adopted on the basis of allocative efficiency. However, there is a growing distributional concern that market forces could increase the pollution exposure gap between disadvantaged and other communities by spatially reallocating pollution. We...

This paper shows that greater global spatial correlation of productivities can increase cross-country welfare dispersion by increasing the correlation between a country's productivity and its gains from trade. We causally validate this prediction using a global climatic phenomenon as a natural...

Property rights are widely prescribed for addressing overextraction of common pool resources, yet causal evidence of their effectiveness remains elusive. We develop a model of dynamic groundwater extraction to demonstrate how a spatial regression discontinuity design exploiting a...

This paper uses detailed production data from a half million Chinese manufacturing plants over 1998-2007 to estimate the effects of temperature on firm-level total factor productivity (TFP), factor inputs, and output. We detect an inverted U- shaped relationship between temperature and TFP and...

A near-catastrophic drought in Cape Town, South Africa illustrates three general implications of climate change for publicly-provided utility services. First, to reduce aggregate water demand, the public utility increased prices, leading to large demand reductions by richer households. Prior to...