Yukiko Hashida is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at University of Georgia. Her research interests are climate change adaptation and natural resource management.

Paper title: The Effect of Managed Retreat on Coastal Property Markets: Evidence from the NY Rising Buyout and Acquisition Program”

Abstract:

Understanding the economic impacts on a community by removing housing and infrastructure from hazard-prone locations is an empirical question. Using data from a buyout and acquisition program in the U.S. state of New York and residential property transactions between 1995 and 2020, we recover hedonic estimates of the property value impacts of government-acquired properties in a coastal hazard area. Our identification strategy exploits the spatial proximities between sales and buyouts and the timing of different stages of the buyout process - closing, demolition (to be converted to open space), auction (to be redeveloped), and redevelopment. Based on repeat sales data with the property-level fixed effects, our results suggest that buyouts have a sizable negative effect on housing prices for adjacent houses, with the effect becoming smaller at the block and neighborhood scale and then dissipating beyond 1,000 m. These findings are consistent between different difference-in-differences specifications, including two-way fixed effects, an event study, an event study that addresses concerns of treatment effect heterogeneity and variation in treatment timing, and a triple difference model. The event study specifications suggest housing market impacts dissipate within five years. We also find heterogeneity in impacts across different stages of the buyout process and types. Our findings are relevant for policy by demonstrating the housing market implications of different buyout methods, the role of information in the buyout process, and highlighting potential avenues to minimize the negative impacts of managed retreat.

Laura Villalobos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Salisbury University. Her research interests are Environmental and Development Economics.

Paper title: “Quantifying COVID-19’s silver lining: Avoided deaths from air quality improvements in Bogotá.”

Abstract. In cities around the world, COVID-19 lockdowns have improved outdoor air quality, in some cases dramatically. Even if only temporary, these improvements could have longer-lasting effects on policy by making chronic air pollution more salient and boosting political pressure for change. To that end, it is important to develop objective estimates of both the air quality improvements associated with COVID-19 lockdowns and the benefits these improvements generate. We use panel data econometric models to estimate the effect of Bogotá’s 16-month lockdown on fine particulate and nitrogen dioxide pollution, epidemiological models to simulate the effect of reductions in these pollutants on long-term and short-term mortality, and benefit transfer methods to estimate the monetary value of the avoided mortality. We find that on average, Bogotá’s lockdown cut fine particulate pollution by 15 percent and nitrogen dioxide pollution by 21 percent. However, the magnitude of these effects varied considerably over the course of the lockdown and across the city’s neighborhoods. Equivalent permanent reductions in these pollutants would reduce long-term premature deaths from air pollution by 23 percent each year, a benefit valued at $1 billion annually. Finally, we estimate that if they occurred ceteris paribus, the temporary reductions in pollutant concentrations in 2020–2021 due to Bogotá’s lockdown would have cut short-term deaths from air pollution by 19 percent, a benefit valued at $244 million.

Diwakar Raisingh is an Economist at U.S. Department of Justice. His research interests are in industrial organization, financial markets, auctions, and dynamic games.

Miguel Zerecero is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine. His research interests include Economic Geography, Macroeconomics and Labor Economics.

"The Birthplace Premium."

Abstract: Why do people stay in economically distressed areas? In this paper, I explore a simple, yet overlooked hypothesis: people like to live close to what they call home. Using administrative data for France, I find: (i) the share of migrants who return to their birthplace is almost twice as large as the share of migrants who go to any other particular location; (ii) there is a negative relationship between labor flows and distance from the workers' birthplace; and (iii) workers accept a wage discount between 9 to 11 percent to live in their home location. To understand the implications of these findings, I build a dynamic quantitative migration model into which I introduce home bias, understood as a utility cost of living away from one's birthplace. I use the model to separately identify home bias and migration costs from the data. I find that differences in birth location lead to average welfare differences of up to 30 percent in consumption-equivalent terms, and explain 43 percent of the total dispersion in welfare. Finally, I show that a migration model without home bias overstates the migration response of agents. This overestimates the efficiency costs associated with place-based policies.