Congestion plays a central role in urban and transportation economics. Existing estimates of congestion costs rely on stated or revealed preferences studies. We explore a complementary measure of congestion costs based on self-reported happiness. Exploiting quasi-random variation in daily congestion in Beijing that arises because of superstitions about the number four, we estimate a strong effect of daily congestion on self-reported happiness.

We analyzed whether a competitive market can behave non-competitively when it is temporarily outside of its long-run equilibrium trajectory.

We pair a county-level panel of annual industrial output with a fine-scale daily weather dataset to  estimate the responses of industrial output to temperature changes in China. We have three primary findings. First, industrial output is nonlinear in temperature changes. With seasonal average temperatures as temperature variables, industrial output increases by 0.7–1.0% for each 1°C increase in average spring temperature, and falls by 1.3–2.3% for each 1°C increase in average summer temperature.

In this paper we analyze the effects of environmental policies on the size distribution of firms. We model a stationary industry where the observed size distribution is a solution to the profit maximization problem of heterogeneous firms that differ in terms of their energy efficiency. We compare the equilibrium size distribution under emission taxes, uniform emission standards, and performance standards. Our results indicate that, unlike emission taxes and performance standards, emission standards introduce regulatory asymmetries favoring small firms.

This study examines the linkage between the profitability of firms measured by return on assets (ROA) and environmental performance measured by eco-efficiency and also the impact of a good environmental management system (EMS) on profitability and eco-efficiency of firms.

As an international metropolitan area undergoing rapid development, Beijing is facing a sharp rise in the volume of motor vehicles and mobility, which has become the major contributor to the air pollution in this city.

Dependency of urban Ethiopian households on rural areas for about 85 percent of their fuel needs is a significant cause of deforestation and forest degradation, resulting in growing fuel scarcity and higher firewood prices.

The ability to provide public goods is essential for economic and social development, yet there is very limited empirical evidence regarding contributions to a real local public good in developing countries. This paper analyzes a field experiment where 200 households in rural Vietnam could make real contributions to an archetypical public good, a bridge.

This paper uses data from household- and plot-level surveys conducted in the highlands of the Tigray and Amhara regions of Ethiopia to examine the contribution of sustainable land-management practices to net values of agricultural production in areas with low- and high-agricultural potential.

The design of a sensor-placement scheme capable of detecting all possible contamination events for a water distribution system before consumers are put at risk is essentially impossible given current technologies and budgets.