The world has pledged to protect 30 percent of its land and waters by 2030 to halt the rapid deterioration of critical ecosystems. We summarize the state of knowledge about the impacts of protected area policies, with a focus on deforestation and vegetation cover. We discuss critical issues...

We use data from Reserve Bank of India to study the impact of India's Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway project on finance-dependent activity. Loan volumes increase by 20-30% in districts along GQ and are stronger in industries more dependent upon external finance. Loan growth begins with...

China's land market features a substantial industrial discount: industrial-zoned land is an order of magnitude cheaper than residential land. In contrast to explanations centered on subsidies to industry or promoting industry growth, we emphasize the importance of future tax revenues from the...

A popular approach for estimating climate change impacts on agriculture is to rely on supply-side reduced-form regressions. These methods, which include the Ricardian approach, focus on how farmers and agricultural land market react to changes in climatic conditions, under the implicit...

The European Union designates 26% of its landmass as a protected area, limiting economic development to favor biodiversity. This paper uses the staggered introduction of protected-area policies between 1985 and 2020 to study the selection of land for protection and the causal effect of...

We predict the amount, share, and value of land dedicated to roadways within and across 316 US Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Despite the amount and value of land dedicated to roadway, our study provides the first such estimate across a broad range of metropolitan areas. Our basic...

Housing prices across much of America have hit historic highs, while less housing is being built. If the U.S. housing stock had expanded at the same rate from 2000-2020 as it did from 1980-2000, there would be 15 million more housing units. This paper analyzes the decline of America's new...

How do the employer and the worker interact during a dismissal? This paper tests whether they cooperate to minimize costs, or instead engage in conflict--i.e., deliberately amplify costs. We leverage a unique feature of the French labor market: an employer and a worker can jointly opt to replace...

This paper proposes novel natural language methods to measure worker rights from collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) for use in empirical economic analysis. Applying unsupervised text-as-data algorithms to a new collection of 30,000 CBAs from Canada in the period 1986-2015, we parse legal...

Shareholder power in the US grew over recent decades due to a steep rise in concentrated institutional ownership. Using establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database for 1982-2015, this paper examines the impact of increases in concentrated institutional...