Conference Agenda

This paper builds on a logic of repeat-sales model to evaluate the impact of the 1936 St. Patrick’s Day flood on housing values and monthly contract rents in Pittsburgh. Based on our preliminary findings, properties located in inundated areas experienced a 10.95% reduction in housing values and a 2.66% reduction in monthly rents relative to comparable non-inundated counterparts, for both owner-occupied and rented units.

In addition, we estimate flood-induced welfare losses by applying the estimated reduction rates to affected properties in our sample. The resulting losses are about $32,208 for inundated owner-occupied properties and $6,903 for inundated rental properties. In total, the estimated losses are $39,111 in 1930 dollars, equivalent to approximately $0.755 million in 2025 dollars after adjusting for inflation.

We examine whether a salient information shock about local nuclear power risk, generated by the pre-distribution of iodine tablets to households within fixed hazard zones around Swiss nuclear power plants, affects nuclear-related voting behaviour. Exploiting eligibility at the sharp distribution boundary, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity design comparing outcomes of nuclear-related, direct-democratic popular votes between adjacent municipalities just inside and just outside the zone. We find no statistically significant positive effects of the iodine tablet distribution on anti-nuclear vote shares and voter turnout. Our findings suggest that the visible-to-voters intervention does not increase perceived risk or negatively affect revealed preferences over nuclear power, which implies that governments can implement precautionary measures on civil-protection grounds without triggering political backlash.

This study develops a micro-level hedonic pricing model to assess how fine-scale measures of varying flood hazard levels affect property values in a compact coastal city prone to flooding,g such as Macau. Integrating high-resolution inundation depth maps and digitized Geographic Information System (GIS) datasets, we construct a comprehensive micro-level panel of 12,464 repeated property transactions spanning 2006-2024. Results show a heterogeneous and nonlinear pattern of the negative impacts of flood hazard levels on property market value, ranging from -13.2% to -3.9%. We employ multiple econometric approaches, including highly disaggregated lot-by-year fixed effects, to address endogeneity concerns inherent in flood risk valuation. Our findings highlight the need for more detailed flood hazard information in alleviating endogeneity issues and recovering the heterogeneity patterns, offering new insights into how housing markets respond to varying flood risk. These results provide actionable guidance for policymakers seeking to understand distributional impacts, target policy interventions, and enhance climate resilience in the face of continued urban expansion under climate change.

This paper investigates how ocean water quality affects residential property values in a rapidly urbanizing coastal city in a developing country—Shenzhen, China. Despite growing global concerns over marine environmental degradation, causal evidence on its economic impact remains scarce, particularly in emerging economies. We combine daily housing transaction data from 2,819 residential complexes (2017–2019) with two marine pollution datasets: monthly chemical indicators from China’s Seawater Quality Monitoring Information System and daily satellite-derived chlorophyll-a (CHL) concentrations from the Copernicus Marine Service. Using a hedonic pricing model, we estimate that a 1 µg/L increase in CHL leads to a 0.12% decrease in unit housing prices, translating to a ¥65.36/m² reduction. To explore behavioral mechanisms, we employ a two-stage model showing that CHL significantly raises PM2.5 levels, which in turn reduce property values—suggesting marine pollution affects the housing market indirectly through more salient air pollution. Further interaction analysis reveals a sub-additive effect between CHL and PM2.5, consistent with bounded environmental perception. These results provide the first evidence of marine pollution’s capitalized cost in a major Chinese city and demonstrate how less visible environmental risks are internalized through more perceptible hazards. The findings inform both coastal environmental regulation and urban housing policy in developing contexts.

Climate change is increasing the expected frequency and severity of coastal hazards, yet development and reinvestment in hazard-prone shorelines continues. A key mechanism is the supply-side response of the housing stock: disasters trigger repairs, renovations, and redevelopment that can improve local amenities, raise nearby housing values, and potentially generate self-reinforcing investment cycles. Using Hurricane Irma and its storm-surge inundation footprint as a quasi-experimental setting, I study these dynamics in Miami-Dade County, Florida. I identify renovation and redevelopment decisions from year-to-year changes in detailed structural attributes in parcel-level tax assessment records. My results suggest that flood exposure increased post-Irma renovation activity and accelerated redevelopment. I also find positive neighborhood spillovers: increased renovation activity in a neighborhood raises both renovation and redevelopment among nearby, non-inundated parcels, indicating that hazard-induced private investment can spread through local amenity channels even in areas that did not flood. While the results signal accelerated neighborhood recovery in the short-term, it also suggests potential for overcapitalization in coastal low lying areas that face repetitive natural hazard risks.

Environmental regulators must meet sustainability targets in the presence of ecological and economic shocks that affect locations and producers unevenly. While many instruments (taxes, quotas, closures, input controls) can be calibrated to deliver the same expected stock path, they differ in how they transmit uncertainty (whether economic or ecological) into realized outcomes. We show that spatial regulation functions as a risk-allocation device for the regulator, determining where harvest can respond to ecological and economic shocks and how profit risk is distributed across vessels and locations. The welfare trade-off between stabilization and flexibility depends on technology, distributional objectives, and ecological sensitivity. We study this mechanism in the U.S. Atlantic sea scallop fishery, which combines rotating spatial closures and access areas with vessel-level effort and catch limits. Using comprehensive vessel-level trip data matched to fine spatial definitions of fishing grounds and regulatory status, we show that regulation primarily reallocates activity across nearby locations, that catch limits bind tightly while effort limits often do not, compressing dispersion across vessels, and that most volatility arises within locations and from persistent boat–area matches. We develop a framework for evaluating spatial policy portfolios that balance flexibility and insurance while holding fixed long-run conservation targets.

Since the early 2000s, fracking of natural gas has greatly increased domestic supply in the US; however, economists have wondered about the local economic impacts. Using grid data at the 0.46 mi2 (1.2 km2) level and tract-level data along with fracking well location and drilling date information from seven Rust Belt and Middle Atlantic states, I find that the presence of a fracking well is associated with an up to 2.5 percent decrease of people in poverty and up to a 8 percent increase in median household income. The reduction of people in poverty is robust to both data sources and multiple specifications, suggesting that benefits of fracking may accrue to the least wealthy individuals.