The principal contribution of this paper is to investigate the relationship between policy uncertainty, caused by recent developments in international markets, and firms' trade margins for the largest economy in Africa: South Africa. In particular, using a unique database on the population of...

We quantify and study state-level economic policy uncertainty. Tapping digital archives for nearly 3,500 local newspapers, we construct three monthly indexes for each state: one that captures state and local sources of policy uncertainty (ΕPU-S), one that captures national and international...

Over the last half decade, a variety of federal legislative proposals for limiting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been put forward, most of which would set a price on carbon. As of early 2013, the one politically plausible policy appears to be a carbon tax, passed as part of a larger fiscal...

This brief paper accompanies the Green Energy and Jobs tool, which is a simple excel-based tool to estimate the job-creation potential of greening the electricity sector. Specifically, it calculates the net job gains or losses from increasing the level of energy efficiency, and from increasing...

The COVID-19 pandemic is a seismically disruptive event. This commentary explores some of the key ways this seismic shift will interact with environmental law. It explores four types of change triggered by the pandemic: (1) behavioral changes (including of behaviors with environmental impacts);...

We provide evidence that lower fertility can simultaneously increase income per capita and lower carbon emissions, eliminating a trade-off central to most policies aimed at slowing global climate change. We estimate the effect of lower fertility on carbon emissions accounting for the fact that...

Linkage of cap-and-trade systems is typically advocated by economists on a general analogy with the beneficial linking of free-trade areas and on the specific grounds that linkage will ensure cost effectiveness among the linked jurisdictions. An appropriate and widely accepted specification for...

The COVID-19 crisis still has a firm grip on the aviation industry after global air traffic slumped to 66% below the previous year's level in 2020, and many airlines could only be saved from bankruptcy by special loans or direct state equity investments. At the same time, there is increasing...

Climate change poses an unprecedented challenge to population health and health systems' resilience. While earlier studies have estimated morbidity attributable to hot or cold weather across cities, we provide the first large-scale, population-wide assessment of extreme temperatures on...