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Journal Article
Coal's Future Looks Uncertain as Rival Fuels Grow
The U.S. energy sector has been turned on its head over the past two decades. Developments in fracking have led to natural gas?s unseating coal in electricity production. U.S. oil production has almost doubled, wind and solar are now the cheapest producers of electricity in some areas of the U.S. even before tax credits, and ethanol refinement has changed both energy and corn markets. At the same time, significant moves in energy efficiency have mitigated the growth in U.S. electricity demand. This scenario was anticipated by very few. If new trends in electricity production continue, coal ...
Journal Article
What Happens When Countries Increase Tariffs?
This essay investigates the potential impact of higher U.S. tariffs on the U.S. economy. To do so, we investigate the evolution of key macroeconomic variables following past episodes of tariff increases across a large number of countries.
Working Paper
The Closing of a Major Airport: Immediate and Longer-Term Housing Market Effects
The closing of a busy airport has large effects on noise and economic activity. Using a unique dataset, we examine the effects of closing Denver’s Stapleton Airport on nearby housing markets. We find evidence of immediate anticipatory price effects upon announcement, but no price changes at closing likely because closing was widely anticipated. Further, after airport closure, high income and white households moved into these locations and developers upgraded the quality of houses being built. Finally, post-closing, these demographic and housing stock changes had substantial effects on ...
Journal Article
Trade Adjusts Gradually After Trade Liberalization
In recent years, the impact of international trade liberalization on economic outcomes such as output, investment, and employment has been at the forefront of political and economic discussions.
Working Paper
Traffic Noise in Georgia: Sound Levels and Inequality
Using Lorenz-type curves, means tests, ordinary least squares, and locally weighted regressions (LWR), we examine the relative burdens of whites, blacks, and Hispanics in Georgia from road and air traffic noise. We find that whites bear less noise than either blacks or Hispanics and that blacks tend to experience more traffic noise than Hispanics. While every Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) showed that blacks experienced relatively more noise than average, such a result did not hold for Hispanics in roughly half of the MSAs. We find much heterogeneity across Census tracts using LWR. For ...
Journal Article
Trade Liberalization and Economic Development
This essay investigates the extent to which trade liberalization affects developed and developing countries differently. In particular, we examine whether exports respond differently to changes in trade barriers in rich and poor countries.
Working Paper
Airport Noise in Atlanta: The Inequality of Sound
We examine how changes in the geographic concentrations of Hispanic and African-American populations are correlated with changes in probabilities of airport noise, in Atlanta, during 2003 and 2012. We estimate ordered probit and locally weighted ordered probit regressions for three different noise categories to determine the correlations between these two demographic groups and the aircraft noise levels experienced by people in individual houses that sold. Then we determine the average coefficient for all houses sold in each Census block group, and we plot each year?s coefficients for each ...
Journal Article
Focus on Low Real Interest Rate Might Be Misplaced
When investors complain about low interest rates, they are usually referring to the rates on government bonds, particularly TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities). But such rates should not be seen as proxies for the rates of return on all investments. Real returns to productive U.S. fixed investment in tangible capital have not fallen over the past 25 years.
Working Paper
Negative Externalities and Real Asset Prices: Closing of Stapleton Airport and Effect on Nearby Housing Markets
The closing of a busy airport has large effects on noise and economic activity. We examine the effects of Stapleton airport?s closing on nearby, Denver housing markets. We find evidence of immediate anticipatory effects on prices upon announcement of the closing, but no price changes at closing likely because it was widely anticipated. However, we find that high income and white households delayed moving into these locations until after the airport?s closing. Also, developers upgraded the quality of houses being built after closing. Further, post-closing, these demographic and housing stock ...
Working Paper
Interregional Migration and Housing Vacancy: Theory and Empirics
We examine homeowner vacancy rate interdependencies over time and space through the channel of migration. Our theoretical analysis extends the Wheaton (1990) search and matching model for housing by incorporating interregional spillovers due to some households’ desires to migrate between regions and by allowing for regime-switching behavior. Our empirical analysis of vacancy rates for the entire U.S. and for Census regions provides visual evidence for the possibility of regime-switching behavior. We explicitly test our model by estimating basic Vector Autoregression (VAR) and ...