Rethinking Recycling: The Effect of China's Recyclable Waste Import Ban on Pollution Relocation in the U.S. 

Paper,  Slides 

Submitted, Nov 2023

In 2017, China announced its Green Sword (GS) policy to ban most recyclable waste imports from overseas. As a result, U.S. recyclable waste exports to China decreased dramatically. Many more U.S. recyclable wastes are now processed domestically, contributing to pollution within the U.S. This paper examines the policy’s effects on U.S. domestic methane emissions and spatial patterns of local pollution. After the GS policy, total methane emissions from the waste industry increased by 12\%. Heterogeneous increases in state-level emissions are positively related to the amount of pre-policy recyclable waste that each state exported to China. Furthermore, local waste disposal transfer data for California confirms that Black communities tended to receive more waste transfers prior to the GS policy. After China’s waste ban, however, relatively more waste pollution relocated to lower-income White communities, narrowing the gap. Among several potential mechanisms for this distributional effect, land costs seem the likeliest explanation.

Can Removing Development Subsidies Promote Adaptation?  The Coastal Barrier Resources Act as a Natural Experiment

with Hannah Druckenmiller, Yanjun (Penny) Liao,  Sophie Pesek, and Margaret Walls

Revise & Resubmit, Nature Climate Change, Nov 2023

As natural disasters grow in frequency and intensity under climate change, limiting populations and properties in harm's way will be one important facet of adaptation. This paper examines the Coastal Barrier Resources Act (CoBRA) of 1982, which eliminated federal incentives in designated coastal areas known as the Coastal Barrier Resources System (CBRS). The authors estimate the causal effect of CBRS designations by identifying plausible counterfactual areas using novel machine learning and matching techniques. The results show that CBRS designations lower development density by 85% inside the designated areas but increase development in neighboring areas by 20%. Consistent with the positive spillover effects, the paper also presents new evidence on flood protection benefits, property values, and changes in demographic characteristics in the affected areas. Overall, the program generates a net increase in property tax revenues in counties along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. These findings inform on ongoing debates regarding cost-effective public policies to prevent over-development in risky areas.

Willingness to Bear the Costs of Preventative Public Health Measures 

Paper, Slides 

with Trudy Ann Cameron, Sep 2020

In 2003, a general-population survey of U.S. residents was used to determine people’s willingness to bear the costs of public policies aimed at reducing health risks to their communities. We re-estimate earlier models, omitting respondent-specific individual characteristics and adding county-level data on a variety of contextual variables circa 2003. Then we transfer our re-estimated model to the context of the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic, substituting 2020-era levels of the contextual variables, including county-level household incomes and unemployment rates. We also simulate the model’s implied values of what would have been people’s ex-ante willingness to pay (WTP) to have avoided the actual monthly totals of COVID-19 cases and deaths from March to April 2020-21, by county and month, for the conterminous U.S. states.