Both energy and the environment are inputs into production, influencing the economy and the overall welfare of the population. While the economy itself has been a central focus of economic history from its inception, energy and the environment have received more limited attention. On the energy...

In an effort to measure and track marine-dependent economic activities, the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has developed two statistical tools: The Economics: National Ocean Watch (ENOW) and the Marine Economy Satellite Account (MESA). In both efforts, the...

We introduce a new database of historical Genuine Savings (GS), an indicator of sustainable development promoted by the World Bank and widely used in contemporary economic research. GS derives from the theoretical work on wealth accounting, and addresses shortcomings in conventional metrics of...

Oil and gas lease negotiations provide mineral owners the opportunity to negotiate for both compensation and auxiliary clauses that may protect their health and properties. We use optical character recognition to assemble a novel dataset of compensation and specific clauses in nearly 60,000...

Open access, competitive exploitation can be incredibly damaging to valuable resources and the human populations that depend upon them. Even though wealth, resource rents and stocks are at stake, open access often seems to be ineffectively addressed across time and space. Institutions vary....

We explore the economic effects of biodiversity loss by developing an ecologically-founded model that captures how different species interact to deliver the ecosystem services that complement other factors of economic production. Aggregate ecosystem services are produced by combining several...

Effective and economical expansion of renewable energy is one of the most urgent and important challenges of addressing climate change. However, many countries are facing a problem because existing network infrastructures (i.e., transmission networks) were not originally built to accommodate...

We combine satellite-based pollution data and test scores from over 10,000 U.S. school districts to estimate the relationship between air pollution and test scores. To deal with potential endogeneity we instrument for air quality using (i) year-to-year coal production variation and (ii) a...

Decarbonization and electrification will require a transformed electricity grid. Our long-run model of entry and exit of generation and storage capacity captures crucial aspects of the electricity industry such as time-varying demand for electricity, intermittency of renewables, and...

How responsive to health shocks are healthcare systems in the developing world? Developing countries are known to have both lower levels of hospital infrastructure and serious health shocks driven by air pollution. These shocks are transitory and may be marginal relative to other health demands,...