Peer-Reviewed Publications
Urban runoff pollutes valuable urban water bodies with excess nutrients and, along with urban runoff management, is a relatively understudied phenomenon in the economics literature. In the face of such runoff, does allocating funds for water management actually improve water quality? We study the effects of a long-standing voluntary taxation program in Orange County, FL on lake water quality using dynamic panel data models and data on several water quality indicators (phosphorus, nitrogen, Secchi disk depth, and Trophic State Index). This program allows homeowners to establish residential self-taxing districts to fund water management and improvement actions. Our results show that taxing district lakes experience significantly improved water quality over time compared to un-managed lakes and that certain district practices are especially effective at reducing phosphorus and nitrogen concentrations in district lakes.
Working Papers
Vehicle Affordability and Emissions Standards (with A. Cassidy, G. Burmeister, and G. Helfand) - Under review
Transportation is a major component of American households' expenditures, encompassing essential tools for accessing critical services like employment and healthcare. Recent tightenings of fuel economy and emissions standards have attempted to improve transportation affordability by reducing the operating costs of personal vehicles specifically, but whether such changes have done so is not well understood. This paper provides descriptive statistics on vehicle affordability trends to answer the question of how vehicle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards affect the affordability of new vehicle purchases and operation for households across the income distribution. We find that lower income households spend more on gasoline than on new vehicle purchases and substitute towards used vehicles. Moreover, we do not find evidence that vehicle GHG emissions standards have had regressive affordability effects.
Drought constrains the supply and increases the temperature of water used by power plants for cooling, thereby decreasing their efficiency and increasing their marginal cost of generation. Given climate change's persistence, understanding power plants' behavior during drought is crucial to maintaining a sustainable electricity sector moving forward. To that end, we ask (1) how much plants' own drought responses depend on the extent of drought in their market and (2) whether wholesale electricity markets actually provide incentives for plants to adapt to an increase in input (water) costs due to drought. Do plants in market areas (e.g., CAISO, ERCOT, and MISO) improve their efficiency in response to drought? What about plants in nonmarket (i.e., cost-of-service) areas where no competitive incentives exist? And how does a plant's response depend on the extent of drought in their market? On the generating technology they use?
Access to public charging infrastructure (EVSE) is key to the continued diffusion of electric vehicles (EVs), which has been boosted by recent federal and state legislation. EVs' enhanced rise drives two opposite market effects: a decrease in refueling demand and an increase in recharging demand. These effects present a precarious predicament for retail gas stations, who have historically been the dominant force in the refueling market but now must content with the advent of EVs and EVSE. How does competition affect their decision to enter the recharging market? How do electricity demand charges, the largest EVSE installation cost barrier, affect this decision? And how can their responses inform policy for EVSE build-out?
Sea level rise is threatening coastal communities. What tools are available to deal with this problem and how can society best address it while protecting/preserving natural coastal environments/ecosystems?
Static models of agrivoltaic system adoption
Agrivoltaic systems (AVS) allow for the colocation of solar panels and crops, thereby providing society a viable solution to food-energy land use frictions. Under what conditions would a farmer choose to adopt AVS? What policy mechanisms can be designed to facilitate farmer AVS adoption?
Works in Progress
BESS for grid stress? Battery energy storage systems' effects on grid congestion and curtailment
Variable renewable energy (VRE) generates substantial environmental and health benefits and is the subject of myriad policies spurring its tremendous diffusion into U.S. markets. It is also spatiotemporally misaligned with electricity demand, and existing transmission infrastructure limits additional benefits capture, causing lost benefits and wholesale market inefficiency. Because transmission expansion and reinforcement is temporally and financially costly, battery energy storage systems (BESS) have been proposed as an alternative that can defer or even bypass transmission investment. Do BESS generate significant VRE curtailment reductions and congestion relief such that they have actually performed as a viable substitute to transmission infrastructure? And what implications do BESS' primary market roles (e.g., arbitrage-only versus arbitrage and ancillary service provision) have for any such effects?
Local and regional effects of California energy storage (with H. Fell and J. Johnson)
Battery energy storage systems (BESS) can help integrate variable renewable energy (VRE) into the electricity grid by mitigating VRE's intermittency and dispatchability issues. Consequently, BESS have the potential to reduce VRE curtailment and emissions in the electricity sector. BESS capacity has grown rapidly in the VRE-friendly California Independent System Operator's (CAISO's) area (totaling ~5 GW as of May 2023), offering an excellent environment in which to answer important questions about BESS' behavior to date. Have BESS reduced VRE curtailment and emissions? Imports/exports? And are BESS' effects localized or widespread?
Community cleanup duty: Estimating property price premiums from self-taxing districts (with D. Scrogin)
Self-taxing districts improve urban lake water quality, but the extent of this environmental effect's presumably positive impact on economic welfare is yet to be explored. We apply a difference-in-differences with staggered treatment timing analysis to property sales data on parcels in approved districts ("district parcels") and nearly-approved district ("nearly-district parcels") to estimate the property price premium generated by self-taxing districts in Orange County, FL. In doing so, we answer two questions: Do districts' water quality improvements create relatively commensurate, smaller, or larger property price gains? And does districts' property type composition affect these gains?
All for sun and sun for all: Evidence of private provision of a public good from Florida Power & Light's SolarNow program
Some customers voluntarily contribute to the construction of solar power projects (e.g., solar trees and canopies) without the usual caveat of exclusive access to the "green" electricity generated; it is made available to all FPL customers. What incentives are driving this voluntary collective action and how has FPL (a major power producer) responded to this pseudo-subsidization of solar power?
Not on my lawn: The effects of Minnesota's phosphorus-free fertilizer law on surface water quality (with Z. Raff)
Non-point source (NPS) phosphorus pollution is a major contributor to the eutrophication and overall degradation of lakes, a valuable natural amenity. Agriculture is the usual NPS suspect, but historically under-addressed urban runoff is also a consequential culprit. Did Minnesota's phosphorus-free fertilizer law (which largely targeted urban areas) improve surface water quality? What benefits/costs arose because of this law and to whom did they flow?
Other Publications (not peer-reviewed)