New working paper! Age and occupation are both risk factors for heat-related mortality, and the two combine to especially affect young, agricultural workers.

New publication! “Heat Disproportionately Kills Young People: Evidence From Wet-Bulb Temperature in Mexico” has been published in Science Advances. Press coverage of the paper can be found in the AP, the Guardian, NPR, the New York Times, and many other sources.

I have been promoted to Associate Professor (without tenure) at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

New working paper: Competition Constrains Adaptation to Climate Shocks. Part of a new series of papers I am working on focused on the costs and constraints people face when adapting to climate shocks. This paper finds that greater market competition reduces the amount of adaptation in the consumer finance sector in Ghana.

New report on the Frontiers of Benefit-Cost Analysis! Find it here. I am proud to have helped draft this report while I was at OIRA, and it is great to see it published! The first report in the series can be found here.

I will be speaking at the 7th Annual Social Cost of Water Pollution Workshop in Washington D.C. next month. Hope to see you there!

A write-up about my talk at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health is now online here.

Scott Rayder cites my paper with Derek and Laura and other papers from the new economics of weather forecasting literature to argue that NOAA’s budget is too small.

New paper: The Freezing Point of History: How Cold Weather Exposure Affects the Emergence of Future Leaders. Adverse weather shocks in the year of birth hinder the production of political and cultural leaders.

Our World in Data cited my research on global inequities in forecast accuracy with Manuel Linsenmeier. I love OWD, so it is great to see them pick up my work!

On Morning Edition, NPR asked the chief of forecast operations at the National Weather Service about my research on forecasts and mortality.

My paper with Josh and Richard was discussed on Matt Clancy’s excellent New Things Under the Sun blog here.

Derek Lemoine, Laura Bakkensen, and I have received an NSF grant to work on the effect of weather forecasts on economic behavior. Looking forward to continuing the work we started with our recent working paper on forecasts and mortality!

I have taken a one-year leave to be Senior Advisor at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a division of the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President.

Derek, Laura, and I have written an op-ed on the role of weather forecasts in saving people’s lives from extreme temperatures. Check it out here at the LA Times.

“Choose Your Moments: Peer Review and Scientific Risk Taking” is now available as a working paper from the NBER.

As a super busy June comes to a close, I have another new paper draft available! “Choose Your Moments: Peer Review and Scientific Risk Taking”, coauthored with Richard Carson and Josh Graff Zivin, shows that biomedical scientists in the U.S. would prefer to take more risks than the NIH when funding scientific proposals. We derive the funding rule scientists want the NIH to follow, showing that it would cause a reevaluation of funding for $3 billion worth of medical research each year.

New paper draft! The paper “Fatal Errors: The Mortality Value of Accurate Weather Forecasts” is now available as an NBER working paper.

A new version of the paper “Why Do We Procrastinate? Present Bias and Optimism” is available here. It includes the results of a new, large-scale experiment studying how overconfidence can cause procrastination.

A new version of my paper on the implications of climate forecasts for estimates of climate damage is available here.

Manuel Linsenmeier won the top prize at the 2023 Columbia Climate School Postdoc Research Symposium for a poster on our new work on global weather forecast inequality.

Two upcoming presentations in California at the end of the month: First the Occasional Workshop in Environmental and Resource Economics, where I will be discussing Renato Molina and Ivan Rudik’s new work on the value of hurricane forecasts. Second presenting new work joint with Edem Klobodu and Francis Annan at a the Stanford Preparing for a Changing Climate Conference.

Danny Bressler will be presenting new work, joint with me and Andrew Wilson, at the EEA meeting in New York. We show that humid heat is especially devastating for the health of children and young adults.

New publication! Adjusting to Rain Before It Falls shows that factor adjustment costs combined with projected increases in rainfall volatility will routinely lead to climate change damage. This effect is missing from all prior equilibrium-based analyses of climate impacts. Lots more in the paper: construction sector is especially vulnerable to these effects, current seasonal rainfall forecasts help construction firms but at the expense of workers, construction firms lose 10% of profit from unanticipatable rainfall shocks.

New policy forum paper published in Science. We discuss the research implications of the SEC’s proposed climate risk disclosure rule, which will hopefully be finalized any day now.

I will be presenting new work on the value of weather forecast improvements at the NBER on March 24th. The talk will be streamed on Youtube here.

Two of my graduate students, Anna Papp and Vincent Bagilet, have put together a great set of simulations, example datasets, and code to work through many of the new two-way fixed effects/dynamic diff-in-diff methods. The code and data can be found on Anna’s Github page here. This could be a really helpful resource for students and researchers learning about these methods, so let me know if you find it helpful.

I will be presenting new work on the value of weather forecasts, joint with Derek Lemoine and Laura Bakkensen, at University of Arizona on December 14th.

The recording of the presentations from UCLA’s Climate Adaptation Symposium are available here. A great event as always!

The second UCLA Climate Adaptation Research Symposium will take place on September 8th. You can see my new work on the value of routine weather forecasts during the 10:45-12:15 PT session.

A new version of my paper on estimating damages from weather while accounting for adaptation is available here. Weather forecasts are really cool and they can help us improve our inference about climate damages.

A new paper evaluating policies to integrate storage into the electricity grid while reducing emissions is now published here. Good policy design really matters here—a popular policy we analyze can actually increase emissions relative to taking no policy action!

Next up for spring is a presentation of Adjusting to Rain Before It Falls at the Joint Columbia, Cornell, MIT, and Stanford sustainable development seminar.

Lots of upcoming presentations this spring, starting with a double header at the AERE sessions at the Eastern Economics Association meeting. You can see my dynamic permits paper on Friday the 26th and a paper on labor adjustment costs and climate damage on the 27th.

On the 15th, I will be presenting on the economic damage from climate change to a new group of interdisciplinary climate change researchers at the CIRC Workshop (including my own) are now available online. Check out the website if you are interested in learning more about the group.

Recordings of the talks from the UCLA Climate Adaptation Research Symposium (including my own) are now available online.

I will be presenting work on the climate change implications of labor adjustment costs at the UCLA Climate Adaptation Research Symposium on September 21st.

Great news on climate change policy in the US: a federal judge blocked rollback of a methane emissions rule, in the process finding that federal agencies must take global climate damages into account when conducting cost-benefit analysis. Congratulations to my Institute for Policy Integrity colleagues for helping make this case.

Ankit Bhutani has created new Python code to estimate two-sample two-stage least squares (TS2SLS). The code also works in R! Find it on Ankit’s github page. The new code provides more accurate standard error calculations than my Stata code.

The new version of our paper on present bias and beliefs is available as an IZA working paper. Congrats to Matthew on his IZA affiliation!

Check out the latest, just-updated draft of Expectations and Adaptation to Environmental Risks. Lots of information on how to estimate the benefit of climate adaptation, the damages from climate conditional on adaptation, and more. Now with twice as much data as the previous version!

New working paper! The Risk of Caution: Evidence from an R&D Experiment shows experimental evidence that people are extremely risk averse when choosing which research and development projects to fund.

I have updated code to estimate two-sample two-stage least squares regressions. It now correctly populates e() and has formatted output. Let me know if you find the program useful!

If you are at the ASSA meeting, come see a presentation of my, Matthew, and Zachary’s paper on the sources of procrastination on Saturday.

My clean peak research was mentioned in a recent article from E&E news.

My new paper with Madison Condon and Michael Livermore asks whether there is a rational justification for the EPA’s new rule limiting what research can be used in cost-benefit analyses. To read more about why this is an important issue, see this recent NY Times article.

New paper: Policymakers have started to respond to the emissions consequences of increased electricity storage. Unfortunately, their proposed policies are likely to be ineffective. What works better? A carbon tax! Find the working paper on my research page.

Sadly, daylight saving time has ended. The only solace during my long, dark evenings is the New York Times article Austin Frakt wrote about my and Matthew’s sleep paper.

The UCSD Economics Department’s first Applied Economics Alumni Workshop will be Saturday October 19th. I will be presenting Labor Market Adjustment to News.

The inaugural conference for the new Center for Environmental Economics and Policy (CEEP) is on Friday October 18th. Details here.

Come see two new papers presented this fall. Labor Market Adjustment to News will be presented at USC on September 12th and UVA on September 26th. Revealing Abatement Costs from Permit Banking Behavior will be presented at RFF on September 16th.