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I am an Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. I am also an affiliated faculty member with the Economics Department at UC Berkeley.
I study questions related to environmental economics and climate change using tools from Macroeconomics and Finance.
You can find my CV here.
Contact: aron-dine@berkeley.edu
Working Papers
Rebuild or Relocate? Recovery after Natural Disasters Job Market Paper
This paper studies the distributional effects of natural disasters and the impact of post-disaster policies. Using flight data and original survey evidence from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, I document that 7% of the population migrated to the mainland U.S. in the immediate aftermath, but that even temporary migration was prohibitively expensive for most households. Those who stayed faced widespread damages to housing, infrastructure, and the local economy. I find that age, wealth, and housing tenure shaped post-disaster choices: many homeowners with severe property damage defaulted on their mortgages, wealthier homeowners rebuilt with government assistance, and younger renters were most likely to leave the island permanently. These empirical findings inform a dynamic equilibrium model of migration, housing, and infrastructure with heterogeneous households. Homeowners with property damage experience significant welfare losses from direct reductions in home equity and housing consumption, while renters and undamaged homeowners also face welfare declines from infrastructure destruction and through general equilibrium price movements. Local infrastructure investment is a cost-effective policy, due to complementarities with both housing consumption and production. In contrast, rebuilding subsidies for homeowners, though effective in preventing mortgage defaults and mitigating housing shortages, are not cost-effective. Homeowners with property damage value these subsidies below cost because they are not guaranteed and do not provide any payout if the home is foreclosed on or sold. More flexible policy schemes could yield large welfare improvements for similar cost.
Household Climate Finance: Theory and Survey Data on Safe and Risky Green Assets -- R&R, American Economic Review
with Johannes Beutel, Monika Piazzesi, and Martin Schneider
This paper studies sustainable investing using data from a representative survey of German households and a quantitative asset pricing model with heterogeneous investors. About a third of households have green investments worth 11% of household wealth. Green investments are currently relatively risky, with equity as the main pathway, while green bank accounts are rare. We find substantial heterogeneity in green taste for both safe and risky green assets throughout the wealth distribution, which can either increase or decrease demand for these assets. Model counterfactuals show that nonpecuniary benefits and hedging demands currently make green equity more expensive for firms. Nevertheless, the rise of sustainable investing has introduced a greenium of about 1%, as investors who are now aware of green stocks bid up their prices. Many households desire green bank accounts which could substantially increase overall green finance. Feeding treatment effects from an RCT in the survey into our model suggests that greater awareness of climate finance could also lead to a further burst in green equity investment.
Publications
Spending Responses to High-Frequency Shifts in Payment Timing: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit
with Aditya Aladangady, David Cashin, Wendy Dunn, Laura Feiveson, Paul Lengermann, Katherine Richard, and Claudia Sahm
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Vol 15 (3), pp. 89–114, August 2023
Re-measuring Gentrification
with devin michelle bunten and Benjamin Preis
Urban Studies, Vol 61 (1), pp. 20-39, May 2023
From Transactions Data to Economic Statistics: Constructing Real-time, High-frequency, Geographic Measures of Consumer Spending
with Aditya Aladangady, Wendy Dunn, Laura Feiveson, Paul Lengermann, and Claudia Sahm
NBER CRIW Volume: Big Data for 21st Century Economic Statistics, 2022
Works in Progress
Migrant Networks and Climate Change
with Emmanuella Kyei Manu
Migration as an adaptation strategy to climate change depends on whether people move in response to climate shocks and where they choose to relocate. Using global migration and temperature data, we document that migration flows are persistent and related to migrant stocks. We find limited evidence of changes in migration patterns in response to global warming to date. We formalize the insurance value of migration in a model that incorporates climate-induced endowment shocks and migrant networks. Our results show that the insurance value of migration depends on the correlation between existing migrant networks and the spatial covariance of climate shocks. A simple quantification exercise reveals that migration offers limited insurance against climate risks, particularly for low-income, climate-exposed countries, because their migrant networks are concentrated in nearby countries.
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