This paper measures the causal effect of time out of the labor force on subsequent employment of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applicants and distinguishes it from the discouragement effect of receiving disability benefits. Using a unique Social Security Administration workload...

This study provides the first nation-wide analysis of the labor market implications of occupational licensing for the U.S. labor market, using data from a specially designed Gallup survey. We find that in 2006, 29 percent of the workforce was required to hold an occupational license from a...

This paper studies how politicians and voters respond to new information on the threats of climate change. Using data on the universe of federal disaster declarations between 1989 and 2014, we document that congress members from districts hit by a hurricane are more likely to support bills...

This paper examines the application of quasi-experimental methods in environmental economics. We begin with two observations: i) standard quasi-experimental methods, first applied in other microeconomic fields, typically assume unit-level treatments that do not spill over across units; (ii)...

The validity of existing empirical tests of the Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) is constantly under scrutiny due to two shortcomings. First, the issues of unobserved heterogeneity and measurement error in environmental regulation are typically ignored due to the lack of a credible, traditional...

We study long-run environmental impacts of trade liberalization on US manufacturing by exploiting a plausibly exogenous reduction in US trade policy uncertainty: the conferral of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) to China. Using detailed data on establishment-level pollution emissions and...

This paper focuses on indivisible multiple-costsingle-benefit projects that must be approved by the government. A simple mechanism is proposed that ensures an efficient and fair implementation of such projects. The proposed mechanism is appropriate for a unilateral information structure: the...

In this paper, we study how mines change local societies in the Nordic countries with a particular focus on the Arctic region. Our study is based on register data at the municipality level from Norway, Sweden, and Finland for the period 1986 to 2013. The applied econometric model allows for...