Research
Research
Information and Premium Shocks: Dual Effects of Flood Zone Reclassification on Insurance Take-up and Residential Mobility. (Job Market Paper)
ABSTRACT
Government risk disclosures are giving homeowners more precise information about flood exposure. I exploit variation from the staggered rollout of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM) updates and use event-time differences around map-effective dates to estimate their effects on premiums, coverage, and mobility. Linking administrative National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) data on insurance policies and claims to county-to-county IRS migration records, I document two principal decision margins through which flood zone reclassification affects household behavior through information and premium shocks: insurance participation and residential mobility. First, floodplain reclassification lowers average premiums by about 5.5% and raises insurance take-up by about 10%. Second, gross migration by about 10.4 movers per 1,000 exemptions, driven by roughly 5.1 in-movers and 5.4 out-movers per 1,000, while net migration stays close to zero. This is consistent with turnover and re-sorting rather than one-sided flight. Mechanism tests show that the information shock and the premium shock operate together: lender compliance converts reclassification into new-policy entry rather than retention with short-run premium compression, price sensitivity is modest and more negative after remapping, and disaster or claims salience together with house-price declines shifts mobility toward higher-income smaller households while reducing net additions. Robustness checks using more granular event studies and alternative outcome definitions support the baseline results. As a result, this paper highlights the role of public information in improving near-term risk sharing and facilitating orderly spatial reallocation, while exposing a tension between expanded coverage and long-run affordability.
The Turnover Channel of Climate Risk Information:Evidence from FEMA Flood Maps.
ABSTRACT
Climate risk management has become a core institution of economic governance and operates through information-based mechanisms that shape household and market behavior. This paper examines how verifiable public signals about flood risk, specifically updates to FEMA’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs), reshape internal migration in the United States. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design based on the precise effective dates of floodplain remapping and county-to-county migration data from 2010 to 2022, I identify the causal effect of localized climate-risk information on population mobility. Remapping increases both inflows and outflows, raising gross turnover while leaving net population nearly unchanged. A Kitagawa-style decomposition shows that these effects arise from higher within-group migration propensities rather than shifts in population composition. Heterogeneity analysis indicates stronger responses in high-mobility, renter-dense, and educated metro areas, and weaker ones among older or partnered populations. A gravity framework applied to origin-destination flows shows that remapping redirects migration streams along existing demographic and market structures, which increases push from constrained origins and enhances pull toward more adaptive destinations. The findings demonstrate that government provided risk information, even in the absence of physical shocks, can reorganize residential patterns through behavioral rather than demographic channels. This mechanism reveals the “information-to-compliance” pathway that characterizes modern climate governance.
Market Authorization Holder (MAH) Pilot Program and Its Role in Driving Innovation in China’s Pharmaceutical Industry. (with Tannista Banerjee, Aditi Sengupta, Zihang Li)
ABSTRACT
This study evaluates the impact of China's Marketing Authorization Holder (MAH) pilot program, implemented between 2016 and 2018, on innovation within the pharmaceutical industry. The program aimed to decouple production rights from marketing rights, facilitating faster approval and commercialization of new products. Using a Difference-in-Differences (DID) approach and a comprehensive dataset of 98,612 patent records from 3,203 companies, we analyzed the effects of the MAH system on patent activity across 4,280 companies. The results show that the MAH program significantly increased the number of authorized patents, forward citations, and patent rights assertions, while also reducing patent examination times. Notably, the program primarily stimulated innovation in non-traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) companies, suggesting that product innovation, rather than process innovation, drove these changes. This research provides new insights into the relationship between regulatory frameworks and innovation, particularly in developing countries, and offers valuable guidance for policymakers seeking to enhance the innovative capacity of the pharmaceutical sector.
Green credit policy and environmental pollution governance: source control or end-of-pipe treatment? (with Zhengyang Li, Tiancai Xing, Ke Guo)
ABSTRACT
Green credit is a major policy innovation to coordinate the balance between economy and environment. This study examines the impact of China’s green credit policy on environmental pollution governance. Using China’s provincial panel data from 2007-2020, we investigate the influence mechanism and channel of green credit on different pollution governance modes: source control and end-of-pipe treatment. The results show that green credit can achieve both source control and end-of-pipe treatment, and the effect of end-of-pipe treatment is more significant. Furthermore, the channels through which green credit affects the two pollution governance models are different. Improving green innovation level is one of the channels through which green credit enhances source control, while pollution control investment is the channel for green credit to affect end-of-pipe treatment. Moreover, in order to explore better administrative means paired with green credit, which is one of the market-oriented environmental policy tools, we also conduct a moderating effect analysis. We find that the combination of government support and green credit is more effective than government punishment in end-of-pipe treatment, yet government support and punishment both weaken the promotion effect of green credit on source control. Our research has some practical significance and may be useful for policymakers.
Who Bears the Burden of Climate Action? Energy Poverty and Carbon Pricing in China
SUMMARY
Carbon pricing is central to cost-effective climate mitigation, yet its distributional consequences for vulnerable populations remain poorly understood in developing economies. This paper examines how China's emissions trading system (ETS) affected energy poverty using province-year panel data from 2005 to 2024. Exploiting staggered ETS adoption across seven pilot provinces (2013-2016) and national expansion (2021), we construct a multidimensional energy poverty index via entropy weights and employ difference-in-differences estimation with the Callaway-Sant'Anna estimator. ETS adoption increased provincial energy poverty by 0.020 index points (3.6% of the mean), concentrated in the first two years and persisting without reversal. High-income provinces experienced immediate impacts; low-income provinces showed delayed but similar effects. Temperate provinces exhibited larger increases than tropical regions due to higher heating needs. Critically, provincial fiscal capacity did not mitigate adverse effects, and renewable energy expansion, green innovation, and government investment showed no mediating role. Our findings demonstrate that carbon pricing exacerbates energy poverty without explicit compensation mechanisms. We conclude that equitable climate transitions require combining carbon pricing with targeted transfers, efficiency subsidies, and institutionalized revenue recycling to protect vulnerable households.
Reclassifying Risk: Flood Zones and the Stability of Social Safety Nets
SUMMARY
This paper explores the impact of FEMA's flood map remapping on household behavior and social safety nets, particularly in the context of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Using a staggered Difference-in-Differences (DID) approach, I analyze NFIP policy and claims data, FEMA flood mapping reports, and government transfer payment data. The findings show that newly classified flood-prone properties experienced a significant increase in flood insurance premiums, with premiums rising by 61% eight years after redistricting. A 1% increase in premiums led to a 1.35 percentage point decrease in policyholder count, though insurance take-up rates rebounded after four years. Additionally, while Medicare and SNAP payments increased, unemployment benefits decreased, resulting in no significant net change in total transfer payments. These results highlight the need for targeted policy interventions to support vulnerable populations as flood risks increase.
He, S., & Banerjee, T. (2025). Energy insecurity and home health: An empirical exploration household experiences in the United States. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 12, 102071.
Guo, K., Cao, Y., He, S., & Li, Z. (2024). Evaluating the efficiency of green economic production and environmental pollution control in China. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 104, 107294.
He, S., & Dang, J. (2018, September). Study on the Threshold Effect of China's Manufacturing Agglomeration on Energy Intensity. In 2018 International Symposium on Humanities and Social Sciences, Management and Education Engineering (HSSMEE 2018) (pp. 366-370). Atlantis Press.