Working Papers
The Price of Risk: Flood Insurance Premium Reform and Local Development
The climate is changing rapidly. Globally, trillions of dollars of housing wealth is at risk of flood damage, putting billions of people in harm’s way. In many countries, federally administered flood insurance programs are the primary tool that policy-makers employ to influence coastal development and mitigate flood damages. I study the design of federal flood insurance programs in the United States, using data on the universe of tax parcels in Florida and North Carolina. For identification, I leverage a 2021 reform to the rate calculation methodology of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which more tightly linked prices to actual underlying flood risk. I find that increasing flood insurance premiums causes declines in new development. My findings suggest the existence of substantial moral hazard prior to the reform, and emphasize the importance of accurately pricing risk for avoiding the worst economic—and human—costs of climate change.
Demand for Green Skills in an Evolving Landscape (with Michel Serafinelli, Esther Arenas-Arroyo, Bernhard Schmidpeter, and Friederike Mengel)
How does firms’ skill demand change as the business landscape evolves? We present evidence from the green transition by analyzing how hurricanes impact demand for green skills. These disasters signal the risks of not acting on environmental issues. Using data from U.S. online job postings (2010–2019) and hurricane paths, we create a new measure of green job postings. Firms in areas affected by hurricanes are 6.4% more likely to post jobs that require green skills after the event, particularly those serving local markets.
Works in Progress
Path Dependence in the Labor Market: the Long-run Effects of Early Career Occupational Experience (with Jesse Bruhn, Luke Gallagher, Matthew Gudgeon, Adam Isen, and Aaron Phipps)