Quantifying factors giving rise to temporal variation in forest fires is important for advancing scientific understanding and improving fire prevention. We demonstrate that eighty percent of the large year-to-year variation in forest area burned in California can be accounted for by variation in...

The social costs of pollution and climate change hinge critically on humans' ability to adapt. Based on transaction records from the world's largest payment network, this research compiles daily travel flows and documents that China's rapid expansion of high-speed railways (HSR) facilitates the...

We study the relationship between water nutrient pollution and U.S. agriculture using data between the early 1970s and late 2010s. We estimate a positive causal effect of corn acreage on nitrogen concentration in the country's water bodies using alternative empirical approaches. We find that a...

Wildfire activity has increased in the US and is projected to accelerate under future climate change. However, our understanding of the impacts of climate change on wildfire smoke and health remains highly uncertain. We quantify the past and future mortality burden in the US due to wildfire...

We examine how exogenous changes in exposure to air pollution over the past two decades have altered the disparities in home values between Black and White homeowners. We find that air quality capitalization rates are significantly lower for Black homeowners. In fact, they are so much lower...

Forests accompany the cities we build. There are an estimated 5.5 billion urban trees in the United States. Globally, about 25 percent of urban land is covered by tree canopy. This study examines urban forests as a policy tool for air pollution mitigation. We study an afforestation program in...

This paper provides the first estimates of the contemporaneous effect of drinking water quality violations on students' academic achievement. Using student-level test score data with residential addresses, geographic information on water systems, and drinking water violations from North...

Previous research in the US has found negative health effects of contamination when it triggers regulatory violations. An important question is whether levels of contamination that do not trigger a health-based violation impact health. We study the impact of drinking water contamination in...

Although at least 400 million people suffer from seasonal allergies worldwide, the adverse effects of pollen on "non-health" outcomes, such as cognition and productivity, are relatively understudied. Using ambulance archives from Japan, we demonstrate that high pollen days are associated with...

Many environmental hazards produce health effects that take years to arise, but quasi-experimental studies typically measure outcomes and treatment over short time periods. We develop a new approach to overcome this challenge and use it to gauge the effect of exposure to air pollution on US life...