The commercial real estate sector is responsible for a large share of a city's overall carbon footprint. An ongoing trend in this sector has been the entry of big-box stores such as Wal-Mart. Using a unique monthly panel data set for every Wal-Mart store in California from 2006 through 2011, we...

The Los Angeles region has the highest smog levels in the nation. In 1976, daily smog levels exceeded extremely high levels (stage 1 at .20 parts per million) on 102 days at at least one Los Angeles area monitoring station. Despite sharp population and vehicle growth, Los Angeles ozone levels...

Smog is sharply declining in growing cities. This suggests that emissions per mile of driving is declining faster than overall vehicle mileage is growing. This paper analyzes emissions for over 24,000 vehicles tested at random between 1997 and 1999 in California's Random Roadside Emissions...

This paper uses cross-national data from happiness surveys, jointly with data on per capita income and pollution, to examine how self-reported well-being varies with prosperity and environmental conditions. This approach allows us to show that citizens care about prosperity and the environment,...

China's ongoing urban economic growth has sharply increased the population's per capita income, lowered the count of people living below the poverty line, and caused major environmental problems. We survey the growing literature investigating the causes and consequences of China's urban...

Under communism, Eastern Europe's cities were significantly more polluted than their Western European counterparts. As ex-communist nations have made the transition to capitalism, these economies have experienced a composition shift in output. Manufacturing's share of employment is falling while...

We know that the "average" person has experienced a decrease in air pollution levels over the past two decades, but we do not know much about the distributional effects of regulation-induced reduction. Have the poor, as well as the wealthy, significantly reduced their exposure to pollutants? Are...

China urbanization is associated with both increases in per-capita income and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper uses micro data to rank 74 major Chinese cities with respect to their household carbon footprint. We find that the "greenest" cities based on this criterion are Huaian and Suqian...

The geographical location of economic activity within the United States has important implications for carbon mitigation. If households clustered in California's cities rather than in more humid southern cities such as Memphis and Houston, then the average household carbon footprint would be...