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The Broadening Impact of Rising Wildfire Smoke in the United States
Smoke from wildfires has increased dramatically in the United States in recent years. As a result, new populations, including many living in urban areas in the eastern parts of the country, have become increasingly exposed to particulate matter from wildfire smoke. These trends reflect the fact that larger and more intense plumes travel farther, affecting regions that have traditionally been far less exposed to wildfire smoke. In short, wildfire smoke has now become a national problem.
Working Paper
The Impact of Weather on Local Employment: Using Big Data on Small Places
This paper exploits vast granular data ? over 10 million county-industry-month observations ? to estimate dynamic panel data models of weather?s short-run employment effects. I estimated the contemporaneous and cumulative effects of temperature, precipitation, snowfall, the frequency of very hot days, the frequency of very cold days, and natural disasters on private nonfarm employment growth. The short-run effects of weather vary considerably across sectors and regions. Favorable weather in one county has positive spillovers to nearby counties but negative spillovers to distant counties. ...
Working Paper
Air Pollution and Rent Prices: Evidence from Wildfire Smoke Plumes
We leverage quasi-experimental wildfire smoke shocks to analyze the causal effect of air pollution (PM2.5) on rent prices, using satellite-based smoke plumes data and ambient air pollution data. Our results indicate that the rent of homes that are not directly affected by wildfires but exposed to wildfire plumes declines by about -2.4% per one standard deviation increase in PM2.5. The response of home prices is more than threefold highlighting a gap in the tolerance of poor air quality, which we find is driven by age-related differences between tenants and homeowners. We further show evidence ...
Working Paper
Clearing the Fog: The Predictive Power of Weather for Employment Reports and their Asset Price Responses
This paper exploits vast granular data – with over one million county-month observations – to estimate a dynamic panel data model of weather’s local employment effects. The fitted county model is then aggregated and used to generate in-sample and rolling out-of-sample (“nowcast”) estimates of the weather effect on national monthly employment. These nowcasts, which use only employment and weather data available prior to a given employment report, are significantly predictive not only of the surprise component of employment reports but also of stock and bond market returns on the days ...