We provide estimates of the impact of restrictive residential land use environments on the price of land across major American housing markets. Using micro data on vacant land purchased to develop single family housing, we implement a new empirical strategy for estimating so-called 'zoning...

Land-use changes involve important economic and environmental effects with implications for international trade, global climate change, wildlife, and other policy issues. We use an econometric model to identify factors driving land-use change in the United States between 1982 and 1997. We...

We link census records for millions of farm children to identify owner-operators of the family farm in adulthood, providing the first population-level evidence on intergenerational farm transfers. Using our panel of U.S. census data from 1900 to 1940, our analysis supports the primogeniture...

For nearly three centuries, Indigenous peoples within the borders of present-day Canada engaged in treaty-making with the British Crown and other European powers. These treaties regularly formed the colonial legal basis for access to Indigenous lands. However, treaties were not negotiated...

Much of the property damage from wildfires occurs when fires spread into built up areas, the wildland urban interface. Fire spread within such areas occurs from house to house, as embers from one burning structure ignite neighboring ones. Actions can be taken to mitigate the chances that a given...

Around 1875 the U.S. had none of the world's leading research universities; today, it accounts for the majority of the top-ranked. Many observers cite events surrounding World War II as the source of this reversal. We present evidence that U.S. research universities had surpassed most countries'...

We use machine learning to analyze minute-by-minute Bloomberg online status data and study how the effort provision of top executives in public corporations affects firm value. While executives likely spend most of their time doing other activities, Bloomberg usage data allows us to characterize...

Dual-class common stock allows for the separation of voting rights and cash flow rights across the different classes of equity. We construct a large sample of dual-class firms in the United States and analyze the relationships of insider's cash flow rights and voting rights with firm value,...

We introduce a model of the admissions process based upon standard agency theory and explore its implications with economics PhD admissions data from 2013-2019. We show that a subjective score that aggregates subjective ratings and recommendation letter features plays a more important role in...

Health insurers often tie payments to providers' quality of care. Although payers do this to elicit more effort from providers, some providers may game the system by avoiding patients who would cause their quality scores to fall. We use annual variation in the criteria for Medicare's Quality...