Job Market Paper

Of Tracks and Trails: How Accessible Green Spaces Reshape Communities

What happens to neighborhoods after urban greening takes root? In the United States, over 26,000 miles of abandoned rail lines have been converted into trails, with another 9,000 miles underway. I use the geography of abandoned railroads to study how decades of rail trail openings have changed neighborhoods. In Greater Boston, where I observe trail opening dates, housing values rise by 7% within a decade of opening, alongside a 1.8 percentage point increase in the college-educated share and little change in other socioeconomic measures. By the second decade, housing values rise by 19%, the college-educated share by 7.7 points, and household incomes by 14%, suggesting that early compositional shifts amplify over time. Across all metropolitan areas, where I observe rail trails but not date of opening, I instrument for trail creation using inefficiently connected historical rail segments, identified by edge betweenness centrality. Long-difference estimates show that between 1970 and 2020, tracts with rail trails experienced 20% higher housing value growth and similar patterns of sorting, along with a 24% increase in housing supply. [draft]

Works in Progress

Who Pays for Climate Change Adaptation? Investigating the Impact of Mandatory Air Conditioning

This paper examines the economic impact of a policy enacted in Montgomery County, Maryland, which required landlords to install AC units in all rental properties. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I analyze how this regulatory change affects rental prices. I find that rents increased by $56 to $97 for units that experienced tenant turnover and by $41 to $53 overall across the market. This suggests that landlords more than fully passed the costs of AC installation onto tenants. These effects are more pronounced in rental properties located in median income census tracts. To explain this substantial effect, I present descriptive evidence that landlords may be undertaking additional renovations concurrent with the required AC installations. [draft]

Publications

“Environment Matters: New Evidence from Mexican Migration” (with Melanie Khamis), in Applied Economics Letters (2019): 1-6. [Paper]

“Adaptation in an Uncertain World - Detection and Attribution of Climate Change Trends and Extreme Possibilities” (with Gary Yohe), in W.T. Pfeffer, J.B Smith, and K.L Ebi (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Planning for Climate Change Hazards, Oxford University Press, October 2019. [Paper]

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