Prior research demonstrates that mortality rates increase during economic booms and decrease during economic busts, but little analysis has been conducted investigating the role of environmental risks as potential mechanisms for this relationship. We investigate the contribution of air pollution...

Environmental economics has traditionally fallen in the domain of microeconomics, but recently approaches from macroeconomics have been applied to studying environmental policy. We focus on two macroeconomic tools and their application to environmental economics. First, real business cycle...

Government policies that are not intended to address environmental concerns can nonetheless distort prices and affect firms' emissions. We present an analytical general equilibrium model to study the effect of distortionary subsidies on factor prices and on environmental outcomes. We model an...

How should environmental policy respond to economic fluctuations caused by persistent productivity shocks? This paper answers that question using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium real business cycle model that includes a pollution externality. I first estimate the relationship between...

This paper explores the relationship between time preferences, economic incentives, and body mass index (BMI). Using data from the 2006 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we first show that greater impatience increases BMI and the likelihood of obesity even after controlling for demographic,...

Empirical evidence suggests that individual choices often display behavioral anomalies, like time-inconsistent preferences. For example, a household's preferences at the time of purchase of energy-intensive durable goods like cars and appliances may differ from its preferences later on,...