Orcinus Orca is the world's largest predator, and simultaneously a significant tourist asset and cultural icon for much of the Pacific Northwest. In the past two decades, the Southern Resident Killer whales (SRKW) have declined by more than 25 percent, and this population appears on a...

In the 16th century, North America contained 25-30 million buffalo; by the late 19th century less than 100 remained. While removing the buffalo east of the Mississippi took settlers over 100 years, the remaining 10 to 15 million buffalo on the Great Plains were killed in a punctuated slaughter...

All empirical researchers know that having more sources of variation in a dataset is valuable. What is not known is how valuable, and if the marginal value of adding another source of variation diminishes or increases. This note provides explicit answers to these questions. It defines "valuable"...

This paper sets out a simple spatial model of energy exploitation to ask how the location and productivity of energy resources affects the distribution of economic activity across geographic space. By combining elements from energy economics and economic geography we link the productivity of...

The rebound effect is a well-known behavioral response whereby potential energy savings from efficiency improvements are partially offset by increased consumption of energy services, as the marginal cost of energy services is reduced. This paper characterizes a similar rebound effect related to...

Engineering the climate via Solar Radiation Management (SRM) is increasingly considered as a component of future climate policies. We study the strategic incentives for countries to choose the level of SRM at different times in the future, accounting for the regionally uneven effect of SRM on...

Columbus’s arrival in the New World triggered an unprecedented movement of people and crops across the Atlantic Ocean. We study an overlooked part of this Columbian Exchange: the effects of New World crops in Africa. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that the introduction of maize increased...

This paper introduces geoengineering into an optimal control model of climate change economics. Together with mitigation and adaptation, carbon and solar geoengineering span the universe of possible climate policies. Their wildly different characteristics have important implications for climate...