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...

Economic policies often involve dynamic interventions, where individuals receive repeated interventions over multiple periods. This dynamics makes past responses informative to predict future responses and ultimate outcomes depend on the history of interventions. Despite these phenomena,...

We develop an optimal policy assignment rule that integrates two distinctive approaches commonly used in economics--targeting by observables and targeting through self-selection. Our method can be used with experimental or quasi-experimental data to identify who should be treated, be untreated,...

Despite the incentives of incumbent domestic listed corporations (DLCs) in the electricity generation industry, private equity, institutional investors, and foreign corporations have played an outsized role in financing the energy transition. These new entrants are twice as likely to create...

The Inflation Reduction Act could deliver more than $1 trillion in tax expenditures and outlays targeting clean energy deployment, but considerable uncertainty characterizes the economic, emissions, energy, and fiscal implications of the law. I review the features of the political system...

While several papers examine the effects of renewable portfolio standards (RPS) on electricity prices, they mainly rely on state-level data and there has been little research on how RPS policies affect manufacturing activity via their effect on electricity prices. Using plant-level data for the...

Encouraged by the declining cost of grid-scale renewables, recent analyses conclude that the United States could reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 at relatively low cost using currently available technologies. While the cost of renewable generation has declined dramatically,...

Environmental policy is increasingly concerned with measuring emissions resulting from local changes to electricity consumption. These marginal emissions are challenging to measure because electricity grids encompass multiple locations and the information available to identify the effect of each...

From 2015 to 2023, the United States transformed from a net importer of natural gas to the world's largest liquified natural gas (LNG) exporter. We find that this surge in LNG exports has reconnected U.S. gas prices to world market prices, after a hiatus of "shut-in" fracked gas. We estimate...

The phasedown of coal for electricity generation is considered vital to meeting global climate targets. Many countries have pledged to stop using coal, with some as early as 2030. While the United States has no target currently in place, several states do. In this paper, we examine the...