Research
The Effects of Conservation Easements on Housing Prices and Development [Job Market Paper] (download)
Conservation easements are a commonly used tool to permanently conserve land with environmental and social importance. While they have the ability to provide local amenity value to nearby properties, conservation easements exist in perpetuity which ensures they will never be developed, potentially exacerbating housing shortages. I examine the effect of conservation easements on nearby properties using a nationwide dataset of over 30 million repeat sales of residential properties across 30 years. I find that conservation easements increase nearby property values up to 5.7 percent. Homeowners particularly value easements for environmental and recreation purposes and those held by government agencies. These results are mainly driven by sales in metropolitan counties. I also find that at the county level, conservation easements have a small but significant effect in reducing new development, which is more pronounced in counties that are more developed. These results illustrate the value provided by permanent land conservation but also the role that land use restrictions play in local development.
Trading Green? Do Tax Credit Markets Improve Permanent Land Conservation?(download)
with Dominic Parker and Annalise Helm
Governments traditionally use top-down regulations to mandate conservation on private land but voluntary, incentive-based Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are an emerging alternative. Critics worry that PES programs subsidize wealthy landowners who would have conserved absent compensation and fail to target lands with high conservation value. We ask how conservation incentives can be made more effective in the context of the United States’ dominant PES system—conservation easements, covering 38 million acres and funded primarily by tax breaks. We hypothesize that markets for transferable tax credits will expand participation among low-income landowners while also improving conservation outcomes. Using a calculator of federal and state tax codes from 1990–2025 and policy changes in five states allowing transferability, we find that before markets, high-income donors faced a much lower after-tax cost of conservation than low and medium-income donors. Markets shrunk this gap and the donation responses across income levels leading to a greater proportion of easements over farmland under conversion pressure relative to non-working lands hosting second-homes. Markets also increased measures of ecological value and agricultural soil quality across easements. These results demonstrate how decentralized trade in tax credits can improve conservation targeting without subsidy expansion or new ecological mandates.
The Effect of Bike Sharing Systems on Traffic Accidents, Injuries, and Fatalities (download)
Bike sharing systems (BSS) have become prominent in the majority of large U.S. cities as another transportation option. I quantify the effects of an increase in the usership of these systems on traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities and discuss the mechanisms through which these effects occur. For my empirical analysis, I utilize daily data from 8 different U.S. cities between 2014 and 2022 of BSS ridership and traffic accidents. The primary identification strategy uses a negative binomial model with average wind speed as an instrument for BSS ridership. I find that a 1 standard deviation increase in BSS ridership increases accidents by 11 percent, injuries by 24.3 percent, and fatalities by 96 percent. Additional model specifications suggest factors like bike infrastructure play the biggest role in overall safety.
