In an urbanizing world economy featuring thousands of cities, households and firms have strong incentives to make locational investments and self protection choices to reduce their exposure to new climate change induced risks. This pursuit of self interest reduces the costs imposed by climate...

Urban density both facilitates consumption opportunities and encourages individuals to drive less and walk and use public transit more. Using several data sets, we document that high quality of life consumer center cities are low carbon cities. We discuss possible causal channels for this...

The geographical location of economic activity within the United States has important implications for carbon mitigation. If households clustered in California's cities rather than in more humid southern cities such as Memphis and Houston, then the average household carbon footprint would be...

In recent years, Californians have voted on two key pieces of low carbon regulation. The resulting voting patterns provide an opportunity to examine the demand for carbon mitigation efforts. Household voting patterns are found to mirror the voting patterns by the U.S Congress on national carbon...

The commercial real estate sector is responsible for a large share of a city's overall carbon footprint. An ongoing trend in this sector has been the entry of big-box stores such as Wal-Mart. Using a unique monthly panel data set for every Wal-Mart store in California from 2006 through 2011, we...

Carbon dioxide emissions may create significant social harm because of global warming, yet American urban development tends to be in low density areas with very hot summers. In this paper, we attempt to quantify the carbon dioxide emissions associated with new construction in different locations...

China urbanization is associated with both increases in per-capita income and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper uses micro data to rank 74 major Chinese cities with respect to their household carbon footprint. We find that the "greenest" cities based on this criterion are Huaian and Suqian...

Stringent regulation for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions will impose different costs across geographical regions. Low-carbon, environmentalist states, such as California, would bear less of the incidence of such regulation than high-carbon Midwestern states. Such anticipated costs are likely...

We study the long-term impact of climate change on economic activity across countries, using a stochastic growth model where labor productivity is affected by country-specific climate variables-defined as deviations of temperature and precipitation from their historical norms. Using a panel data...

Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. To understand the productivity both...