Research

Peer-Reviewed Publications

• Climate and Migration in the United States (with Prashant Bharadwaj, Jamie Mullins, and Nick Obradovich, conditionally accepted as a short paper at the Journal of Public Economics, 2025)
  • Pre-print $\cdot$ Replication package
• Barriers to Civic Action on Clean Air (with Shweta Bhogale and Teevrat Garg, conditionally accepted based on pre-results review at the Journal of Development Economics, 2025)
  • Registered Report Stage 1
• Mandated vs. Voluntary Adaptation to Natural Disasters: The Case of U.S. Wildfires (with Judson Boomhower, accepted at the Journal of Political Economy, 2024)
  • NBER Working Paper (December 2021)
  • Selected media: Headwaters Economics Blog Post $\cdot$ New York Times $\cdot$ Marketplace $\cdot$The Weeds $\cdot$ Marketwatch $\cdot$ LA Times $\cdot$ Washington Post (2025 LA fires) $\cdot$ The New Yorker (2025 LA fires)
• Quantifying Fire-Specific Smoke Severity (with Jeff Wen, Marshall Burke, and Judson Boomhower, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023)
  • Paper $\cdot$ Preprint
  • Selected media: New York Times 1 $\cdot$ New York Times 2
• The Economic Incidence of Wildfire Suppression in the United States (with Judson Boomhower, previously titled “Moral Hazard, Wildfires, and the Economic Incidence of Natural Disasters,” AEJ: Applied Economics, 2023)
  • Paper $\cdot$ NBER Working Paper
• Exposures and Behavioral Responses to Wildfire Smoke (with Marshall Burke, Sam Heft-Neal, Jessica Li, Anne Driscoll, Matthieu Stigler, Joakim Weill, Jennifer Burney, Jeff Wen, Marissa Childs, and Carlos Gould, Nature: Human Behavior, 2022)
  • Paper $\cdot$ NBER Working Paper
• Default Effects, Follow-on Behavior and Welfare in Residential Electricity Pricing Program (with Meredith Fowlie, Catherine Wolfram, C. Anna Spurlock, Annika Todd, and Peter Cappers, The Review of Economic Studies, 2021)
  • Paper $\cdot$ NBER Working Paper
• The Distribution of COVID-19 Related Risks (with Pierre-Loup Beauregard, Marie Connolly, Nicole Fortin, David A. Green, Pablo Gutierrez Cubillos, Samuel S. Gyetvay, Catherine Haeck, Timea Laura Molnar, Gaëlle Simard-Duplain, Henry E. Siu, Maria teNyenhuis, and Casey Warman, Canadian Journal of Economics, 2021)
  • Paper $\cdot$ NBER Working Paper $\cdot$ CIRANO Working Paper
  • VSE COVID Risk/Reward Assessment Tool $\cdot$ Repo
• Job Loss and Behavioral Change: The Unprecedented Effects of the India Lockdown in Delhi (with Kenneth Lee, Harshil Sahai, and Michael Greenstone, COVID Economics, 2021)
  • Paper $\cdot$ SSRN Working Paper
• Temperature and Temperament: Evidence from Twitter (Journal of Public Economics, 2020)
  • Paper $\cdot$ Pre-print
  • Selected media: Popular Science $\cdot$ Washington Post $\cdot$ Time $\cdot$ Weather Channel $\cdot$ UC Newsroom $\cdot$ Energy Institute $\cdot$ G-FEED $\cdot$ Marginal Revolution
• Rapidly Declining Remarkability of Temperature Anomalies May Obscure Public Perception of Climate Change (with Frances C. Moore, Nick Obradovich, and Flavio Lehner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019)
  • Paper
  • Selected media: New York Times $\cdot$ Washington Post (op-ed by Moore and Obradovich)
• Higher Temperatures Increase Suicide Rates in the United States and Mexico (with Marshall Burke, Felipe González, Sam Heft-Neal, Ceren Baysan, Sanjay Basu, and Solomon Hsiang, Nature Climate Change, 2018)
  • Paper $\cdot$ Comment $\cdot$ Response
  • Selected media: The Atlantic $\cdot$ The Guardian $\cdot$ Reuters
• Weather Impacts Expressed Sentiment (with Nick Obradovich, Yury Kryvasheyeu, Haohui Chen, Lorenzo Coviello, Esteban Moro, Manuel Cebrian, and James H. Fowler, PLOS ONE, 2018)
  • Paper
  • Selected media: MIT Technology Review
• Climate Change is Projected to Have Severe Impacts on the Frequency and Intensity of Peak Electricity Demand Across the United States (with Max Auffhammer and Catherine H. Hausman, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017)
  • Paper
  • Selected media: New York Times $\cdot$ ARS Technica

Working papers

• Is the Demand for Clean Air Too Low? Experimental Evidence from Delhi (with Michael Greenstone, Kenneth Lee, and Harshil Sahai)
  • Working Paper
• Incentivizing Self-Protection from Wildfires (with Judson Boomhower and Bob Horton)
  • Working Paper $\cdot$ J-PAL blog post
• Does Time Shift Behavior? The Clock- vs. Solar-time Tradeoff (with Severin Borenstein and Ed Rubin)
  • Working Paper $\cdot$ NBER Working Paper (March 2023) $\cdot$ Blog post

Selected work in progress

• The Distribution and Consequences of Disaster Property Losses: Evidence from Tax Returns of Wildfire Victims (with Judson Boomhower, Jonathan Colmer and John Voorheis)

• Labor Lock-in in the Fossil Fuel Industry (with Eva Lyubich and Katherine Wagner)

• Adaptation and Insurance in the Agriculture Sector (with Talha Naeem and Guglielmo Zappala)

Other writing

• How to Spend One Trillion Dollars: The US Decarbonization Conundrum (with Peter Christensen, Teevrat Garg, Shanjun Li, Gordon C. McCord, Erich Muehlegger, Erica Myers, Emma Noble Smith, and David S. Rapson, comment in Nature, 2024)
  • Comment
• Book Review: The Carbon Tax Question: Clarifying Canada’s Most Consequential Policy Debate (by Thomas F. Pedersen). BC Studies, 2024.
  • Review