Research
Publications
The Willingness to Pay for a Cooler Day: Evidence from 50 Years of Major League Baseball
with Melissa LoPalo and Kevin Kuruc.
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 17(1): 126-59
The climate economy literature has documented adverse effects of extreme temperatures on well-being through mechanisms such as mortality, productivity, and conflict. Impacts due simply to discomfort are less well understood. This paper investigates individuals’ valuations of weather using a revealed preference approach. We first quantify the decline in attendance at Major League Baseball games on hot and cold days. Leveraging this finding coupled with the historically informed assumption of a horizontal supply curve, we infer a monetized estimate of the disutility of extreme temperatures. We estimate a $1.53 utility loss per hour of exposure to high temperatures, implying nontrivial aggregate welfare effects.
I am Jane. Do I Pay More in the Housing Market?
with Myongjin Kim, Leilei Shen, and Brent Norwood.
Economic Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 39(2), pages 1612-1620.
Do women pay more than men in the housing market? We utilize repeat-sales housing data from ZTRAX to examine if gender gaps exist in house purchase prices and loan-to-price ratios. We find that female homebuyers pay a 2% premium on average. In addition, female homebuyers’ loan to price ratio is 3 percentage points lower than that of male buyers. We also show that female buyers pay less when the seller is female than when the seller is male. However, the gender price differentials and loan-to-price differentials are disappearing in more recent years. One possible explanation for the disappearing gender price differentials in house prices and loan-to-price ratios is the shrinking of the gender wage gap in recent years.
Working Papers
Works in Progress
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- Evaluating Hurriance Impacts on Housing Markets: A Synthetic Control Approach
- with William Thorne (CUNY Graduate Center)