Matthew E. Kahn

The Death Toll from Natural Disasters: The Role of Income, Geography and Institutions

Using a new data set on annual deaths from disasters in 73 nations from 1980 to 2002, this paper tests several hypotheses concerning natural-disaster mitigation. Though richer nations do not experience fewer natural disasters than poorer nations, richer nations do suffer less death from disaster. Economic development provides implicit insurance against natures shocks. Democracies and nations with higher-quality institutions suffer less death from natural disaster. Because climate change is expected to increase the frequency of natural disasters such as floods, these results have implications for the incidence of global warming.

The Greenness of Cities: Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development

Carbon dioxide emissions may create significant social harm because of global warming, yet American urban development tends to be in low density areas with very hot summers. In this paper, we attempt to quantify the carbon dioxide emissions associated with new construction in different locations across the country. We look at emissions from driving, public transit, home heating, and household electricity usage. We find that the lowest emissions areas are generally in California and that the highest emissions areas are in Texas and Oklahoma. There is a strong negative association between emissions and land use regulations. By restricting new development, the cleanest areas of the country would seem to be pushing new development towards places with higher emissions. Cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas, and the city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York.

Power Couples: Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940–1990

College educated couples are increasingly located in large metropolitan areas. These areas were home to 32 percent of all college educated couples in 1940, 39 percent in 1970, and 50 percent in 1990. We investigate whether this trend can be explained by increasing urbanization of the college educated or the growth of dual career households and the resulting severity of the colocation problem. We argue that the latter explanation is the primary one. Smaller cities may therefore experience reduced inflows of human capital relative to the past and thus become poorer.

Estimating Housing Demand With an Application to Explaining Racial Segregation in Cities

We present a three-stage, nonparametric estimation procedure to recover willingness to pay for housing attributes. In the first stage we estimate a nonparametric hedonic home price function. In the second stage we recover each consumers taste parameters for product characteristics using first-order conditions for utility maximization. Finally, in the third stage we estimate the distribution of household tastes as a function of household demographics. As an application of our methods, we compare alternative explanations for why blacks choose to live in center cities while whites suburbanize.

Understanding the American Decline in Social Capital, 1952 -1998

Social capital describes both the relations across and within families. Loury(1977) emphasized the importance of social capital within the home for the de-velopment of children. These relations between parents and children and organ-izations and individuals are valuable because they increase trust between indi-viduals and allow them to work together to achieve common economic andpolitical goals. Tocqueville (1840/1981, pp.137–141) argued that democraticcountries that lost the habit of association would find their very civilizations inperil because they had no other substitutes for reciprocal action. His contentionthat voluntary associations help democracies function is supported by a largebody of empirical research. For example, Brady, Verba, and Schlozman (1995)argue that skills in political participation are acquired in such non-political in-

The environmental impact of suburbanization

The U.S. population is increasingly spreading out, moving to the suburbs, and migrating from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt. This paper uses recent household-level data sets to study some of the environmental consequences of population suburbanization. It measures the increase in household driving, home fuel consumption, and land consumption brought about by population dispersion. Suburban households drive 31 percent more than their urban counterparts, and western households drive 35 percent more miles than northeastern households. Despite increased vehicle dependence, local air quality has not been degraded in sprawling areas, thanks to emissions controls. Technological innovation can mitigate the environmental consequences of resource-intensive suburbanization.

The effects of new public projects to expand urban rail transit

Abstract Many US cities invest in large public transit projects in order to reduce private vehicle dependence and to reverse the downward trend in public transit use. Using a unique panel data set for five major cities that upgraded their rail transit systems in the 1980s, we estimate new rail transit’s impact on usage and housing values, using distance as a proxy for transit access. New rail transit has a small impact on usage and housing values. This impact is enough to represent tangible benefits of new transit to nearby residents. New transit’s benefits are not uniformly distributed. We document which demographic groups are over represented in transit growth areas and the changes in transit usage by different demographic groups.

Quality of life and environmental comparisons

Recent research into the urban quality of life (QOL) is reviewed and analyzed, with a special emphasis on the estimation of implicit prices of environmental attributes. New work has incorporated traditional concerns of urban theory into QOL analyses, as well as increased our understanding of specification bias problems in hedonic estimations. However, empirical research into the QOL finds itself at a crossroads, as the large city-specific error components in the underlying wage and housing expenditure hedonic specifications result in imprecise measurement of overall QOL values and rankings. Amassing higher quality databases to deal with this problem should be high on the agenda of those interested in this research program.

Changes in the Value of Life: 1940-1980

We present the first nationwide value of life estimates for the United States at more than one point in time. Our estimates are for every ten years between 1940 and 1980, a period when declines in fatal accident rates were historically unprecedented. Our estimated elasticity of value of life with respect to per capita GNP is 1.5 to 1.7. We illustrate the importance of rising value of life for policy evaluation by examining the benefits of improved longevity since 1900. Our estimated elasticity implies that the current marginal increase in longevity is more valuable than the large increase in the first half of the twentieth century.

Demographic change and the demand for environmental regulation

Environmental regulation in the United States has increased pollution abatement expenditure as a percentage of gross national product from 1.7 percent in 1972 to an estimated 2.6 percent in the year 2000. This rise in regulation has coincided with demographic and economic changes that include rising educational levels, a growing minority population, an aging population, and decreasing employment in polluting industries. This paper examines whether these trends have contributed to increasing aggregate demand for environmental regulation. New evidence on voting on environmental ballots in California, local government environmental expenditures across the United States, and 25 years of congressional voting on environmental issues is examined to document the demographic correlates of environmental support. Minorities and the more educated are more pro-green, whereas manufacturing workers oppose environmental regulation. While demographics help explain observed differences in environmental support and thus can help predict long trends in the “average voters” environmentalism, environmentalism varies substantially year to year unrelated to population demographics.