In Progress: Streetscape Changes and Infrastructure Equity
Streetscape design is an important determinant of the spatial
equilibrium in urban areas. Projects that reallocate street
space between users create winners and losers, and understanding
the impacts of these projects, who bears the costs and benefits,
and how they lead to spatial resorting is an important policy
question as cities pursue these projects. I use a discontinuity
in funding awards from the California Active Transportation
Program to provide quasi-random variation in the implementation
of changes to local street infrastructure, and apply a
Regression Discontinuity design to uncover effects on traffic,
business visitation, safety, and land values.
In Progress: Flood Insurance and Home Sales
Welfare improving buyouts of high flood risk homes need to be
carefully designed to overcome political opposition, and
identifying homeowners most likely to sell their homes in the
wake of a flood could allow FEMA or local agencies to target
buyouts in the wake of a disaster. I assemble a panel of real
estate and flood insurance policy data to estimate whether
holding an insurance policy impacts homeowners’ likelihood of
selling their home following a flood.
In Progress: Optimal and Second Best Nitrogen
Emissions Mitigation Policy
With Jim Sallee: Nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse
gas, produced primarily by global agricultural activities.
However, emissions levels are thought to be highly
heterogeneous across producers and regions, and are
challenging to measure directly. Thus, designing policies to
reduce nitrous oxide emissions has proven more difficult than
policies that address carbon dioxide or methane emissions. We
are analyzing the efficacy, efficiency, and equity of
plausible regulatory policies that seek to reduce nitrogen
emissions from agricultural soils, taking into account the
causes and magnitudes of heterogeneity of emissions across
emitters. We are applying tools of public finance to evaluate
various real world emissions reduction policies, comparing the
welfare impact of an imperfectly targeted tax or policy to the
optimal outcome when emissions vary widely across fields and
crops, as well as the feasibility of compensating farmers who
might stand to be made worse off by a policy while improving
welfare overall. These economic tools allow us to quantify the
heterogeneity we observe in nitrogen emissions, as well as
choose the best policies in light of it.
