Publications

The Role of People vs. Places in Individual Carbon Emissions

American Economic Review (May 2025)

There is substantial spatial heterogeneity in household carbon emissions. I leverage movers in two decades of administrative Decennial Census and American Community Survey data to estimate place effects – the amount by which carbon emissions change for the same household living in different places – for almost 1,000 cities and roughly 61,500 neighborhoods across the US. I estimate that place effects account for 14-23 percent of overall heterogeneity. A change in neighborhood-level place effects from one standard deviation above the mean to one below would reduce household carbon emissions from residential energy and commuting by about 40 percent.

Regulating Mismeasured Pollution: Implications of Firm Heterogeneity for Environmental Policy

With Joe Shapiro and Reed Walker. AEA Papers and Proceedings (2018)

This paper provides the first estimates of within-industry heterogeneity in energy and CO2 productivity for the entire U.S. manufacturing sector. We measure energy and CO2 productivity as output per dollar energy input or per ton CO2 emitted. Three findings emerge. First, within narrowly defined industries, heterogeneity in energy and CO2 productivity across plants is enormous. Second, heterogeneity in energy and CO2 productivity exceeds heterogeneity in most other productivity measures, like labor or total factor productivity. Third, heterogeneity in energy and CO2 productivity has important implications for environmental policies targeting industries rather than plants, including technology standards and carbon border adjustments.

Working Papers

Transitional Costs and the Decline of Coal: Worker-Level Evidence

with Jonathan Colmer, Eleanor Krause, and John Voorheis.

The outside options available to workers critically determine the transitional costs of labor demand shocks. Using comprehensive administrative data, we examine the worker-level effects of the decline of coal – a regionally concentrated labor demand shock that reduced employment by more than 50% between 2011 and 2021. We show that coal workers experienced very large, persistent earnings losses compared to similar workers less connected to coal. In contrast to worker-level analyses of labor demand shocks in more spatially diffuse industries, we show that non-employment is an important margin through which adjustment operates. Workers also earn substantially lower earnings when employed. Moving between industries or regions does little to mitigate losses. Instead, we observe significant increases in SSDI receipt. Our findings suggest that transitional costs are higher in regionally concentrated industries when skills do not easily transfer across sectors.

The Census Environmental Impacts Frame

with John Voorheis, Jonathan Colmer, Kendall Houghton, Mary Munro, Cameron Scalera, and Jennifer Withrow

The natural environment is central to all aspects of life, but efforts to quantify its influence have been hindered by data availability and measurement constraints. To mitigate some of these challenges, we introduce a new prototype of a microdata infrastructure: the Census Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF). The EIF provides detailed individual-level information on demographics, economic characteristics, and address level histories –- linked to spatially and temporally resolved estimates of environmental conditions for each individual –- for almost every resident in the United States over the past two decades. This linked microdata infrastructure provides a unique platform for advancing our understanding about the distribution of environmental amenities and hazards, when, how, and why exposures have evolved over time, and the consequences of environmental inequality and changing environmental conditions. We describe the construction of the EIF, explore issues of coverage and data quality, document patterns and trends in individual exposure to two correlated but distinct air pollutants as an application of the EIF, and discuss implications and opportunities for future research.

The Census Historical Environmental Impacts Frame

With Jennifer Withrow, Kendall Houghton, Surya Menon, Mary Munro, Suvy Qin, and John Voorheis

The Census Bureau’s Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF) is a microdata infrastructure that combines individual-level information on residence, demographics, and economic characteristics with environmental amenities and hazards from 1999 through the present day. To better understand the long-run consequences and intergenerational effects of exposure to a changing environment, we expand the EIF by extending it backward to 1940. The Historical Environmental Impacts Frame (HEIF) combines the Census Bureau’s historical administrative data, publicly available 1940 address information from the 1940 Decennial Census, and historical environmental data. This paper discusses the creation of the HEIF as well as the unique challenges that arise with using the Census Bureau’s historical administrative data.

Nice Work if You Can Get it: The Distribution of Employment and Earnings During the Early Years of the Clean Energy Transition

with Jonathan Colmer, and John Voorheis.

The transition to clean energy represents a fundamental and important shift in economic activity. We present new facts about workers in clean and legacy energy sectors between 2005 and 2019 using linked, administrative employer-employee data for all W-2 workers in the United States. We show that both clean and legacy energy establishments hire a disproportionate share of non-Hispanic White and male workers compared to the working population, that workers rarely move from legacy to clean firms, and that, conditional on education, workers do not earn more in clean firms than in legacy firms. The occupational categories of jobs at clean firms differ notably from occupations at legacy firms and, on average, tend to be performed by workers with higher levels of education. Regional overlap in employment opportunities is not sufficient to facilitate worker transitions from legacy to clean firms. Substantially lower earnings outside of the energy sector combined with low mobility between legacy and clean firms suggests that the costs of the clean transition on workers in legacy fossil fuel sectors may be substantial. At the same time workers moving into clean activities from outside of the energy sector experience significant increases in earnings and greater job stability, suggesting that clean jobs are `good jobs’ for those who can access them.

The Race Gap in Residential Energy Expenditures

Black households have higher residential energy expenditures than white households in the US. This residential energy expenditure gap persists after controlling for income, household size, home-owner status, and city of residence. It decreased but did not disappear between 2010 and 2017, and it is fairly stable in levels across the income distribution, except at the top. Controlling for home type or vintage does not eliminate the gap, but survey evidence on housing characteristics and available appliances is consistent with the gap being driven at least in part by differences in housing stock and related energy efficiency investments.

Selected Work in Progress

Why is Industrial Energy Efficiency Improving?

with Will Rafey, Joe Shapiro, and Reed Walker.

Labor Lock-in in the Fossil Fuel Industry

With Patrick Paylis and Katherine Wagner