Does the environment have a causal effect on economic development? Using meteorological data, we reconstruct every country's exposure to the universe of tropical cyclones during 1950-2008. We exploit random within-country year-to-year variation in cyclone strikes to identify the causal effect of...

This research examines the climatic origins of the diffusion of Neolithic agriculture across countries and archaeological sites. The theory suggests that a foraging society s history of climatic shocks shaped the timing of its adoption of farming. Specifically, as long as climatic disturbances...

This paper examines a large-scale appliance replacement program in Mexico that since 2009 has helped 1.5 million households replace their old refrigerators and air-conditioners with energy-efficient models. Using household-level electric billing records from the population of Mexican residential...

Emissions of greenhouse gases linked with global climate change are affected by diverse aspects of economic activity, including individual consumption, business investment, and government spending. An effective climate policy will have to modify the decision calculus for these activities in the...

Reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change will require dramatic changes in the way that energy is produced and consumed. The cost of technological changes such as alternative energy sources and improved energy efficiency will play a large role in determining the...

Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO2 cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies. First, this system was put in place to curb acid rain, but the main...

There is limited evidence of behavioral changes resulting from electricity information feedback. Using a randomized control trial from a New York apartment building, we study long-term effects of information feedback from “Modlet” in-home devices, which provide near-real-time plug-level...

In this paper, we present what is to our knowledge the first theoretical economic analysis of CO2- enhanced oil recovery (EOR). This technique, which has been used successfully in a number of oil plays (notably in West Texas, Wyoming, and Saskatchewan), entails injection of CO2 into mature oil...

We provide the first estimates of the potential impact of climate change on human capital, focusing on the impacts from both short-run weather and long-run climate. Exploiting the longitudinal structure of the NLSY79 and random fluctuations in weather across interviews, we identify the effect of...

This paper presents a survey of the empirical literature studying the relationship between health outcomes, temperature, and adaptation to temperature extremes. The objective of the paper is to highlight the many remaining gaps in the empirical literature and to provide guidelines for improving...