Forests accompany the cities we build. There are an estimated 5.5 billion urban trees in the United States. Globally, about 25 percent of urban land is covered by tree canopy. This study examines urban forests as a policy tool for air pollution mitigation. We study an afforestation program in...

Will improvements in information technology eliminate face-to- face interactions and make cities obsolete? In this paper, we present a model where individuals make contacts and choose whether to use electronic or face-to-face meetings in their interactions. Cities are modeled as a means of...

Public goods may exhibit complementarities that are essential for determining their individual value. Our results indicate that improving safety near parks can turn them from public bads to goods. Ignoring complementarities may lead to i) undervaluing the potential value of public goods; ii)...

The emergence of novelty, especially of new categories of people and organizations, is undertheorized in the social sciences. Some social worlds are more hospitable to novel introductions or exogenous perturbations than others. Explaining this relative "poisedness" is essential to understanding...

This paper estimates the value of urban trees. The empirical strategy exploits an ecological catastrophe -- the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) infestation in Toronto to isolate exogenous variation in neighborhood tree canopy changes. Adding one tree to a postcode increases property prices by 0.40%; the...

The National Park Service and other agencies have argued that our recreation lands face a crisis of deferred maintenance. This paper evaluates two proposals for funding public lands, increasing gate fees and taxing recreational gear. It analyzes the joint welfare effects of such taxes and the...

We argue that narrow framing, whereby an agent who is offered a new gamble evaluates that gamble in isolation, separately from other risks she already faces, may be a more important feature of decision-making under risk than previously realized. To demonstrate this, we present evidence on...

I show that recreation has become much more egalitarian over the last hundred years by estimating recreational expenditure elasticities in 1888-1890, 1917-1919, 1935-1936, 1972-1973, and 1991. I find that expenditure elasticities have fallen from around two at the beginning of the century to...

Tourism is a fast-growing services sector in developing countries. This paper combines a rich collection of Mexican microdata with a quantitative spatial equilibrium model and a new empirical strategy to study the long-term economic consequences of tourism both locally and in the aggregate. We...