Jacob Gellman

Not sure economists are fully prepared for what's coming in our field.

- The benefits of Clean Air Act regulations have dwarfed costs by 30-to-1. - Reductions in PM2.5 pollution have added 1.4 years to the average American's life expectancy since 1970. - Moderate exposure to air pollution harms the lungs as much as smoking cigarettes. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/c...

Reviewing my slides on role of judiciary in public lands management and getting up to speed with latest on "Loper Bright" decision. This article was very useful and empirical:

Thinking about Molina and Rudik, "The Social Value of Hurricane Forecasts." "Forecasts drive adaptive protective expenditures, and erroneous underforecasts result in a significant increase in total hurricane damage." renatomolinah.com/assets/docs/...

Dead heat for Governor in Oregon. What's on the line for the environment? - OR Dems attempted multiple cap/trade bills since 2019, all blocked by GOP. - Finally some admin regs from 2022 survived court battles. - Vague intentions of linking w/ CA and WA's market. www.oregonlive.com/politics/202...

NYT interactive articles have become so good over the years. This article compares before/after aerial photography of data centers, along with a link to the Cleanview dataset of data centers + off-grid electric capacity. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Is it safe to drink the water? Mostly yes, and more so than 20 years ago. Enjoyed talking with @davidkeiserecon.bsky.social and @margaretwalls1.bsky.social on @rff.org's Resources Radio about 266 million pollution readings, federal water loans, and costs/benefits. www.resources.org/resources-ra...

Salmon exhibit physiological stress starting at 68°F and experience mortality at around 75°F. Warming fall and spring rivers have already had large impacts on migrating and spawning salmon in recent years.

Portland continues to shed jobs, trailing only DC.

Starting from a low baseline in the Pacific Northwest (i.e. historically a lot of hydro), but both Oregon and Washington have actually increased the carbon intensity of their electricity since 1990.

What is the cost of hurricane evacuation? We structurally estimate a travel cost model using data on hurricanes, evac. orders, and billions of obs of cell phone movement. Welfare costs average 55% as a share of mortality costs. (w/ Hennighausen, Watson, Berry.) papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

County-level US election results going back to 1990, previously only available either as paid data or extending only to 2010 in free alternatives, via @pmheideman.bsky.social github.com/pmheideman/u...

I'm guessing Portland's declining rents have something to do with Nike and Intel layoffs, but it's not out of line with some other key metros in the West e.g. SEA, SF, LA, DEN, PHX. Meanwhile the Northeast and Midwest are surging. www.apartmentlist.com/research/ren...

Who gets federal disaster assistance? Kris Smith and Bill Daigle at Headwaters Econ rounded up PDFs from FEMA Preliminary Damage Assessment and turned them into usable county-level data. headwaterseconomics.org/natural-haza...

There is no way that betting on wildfires should be legal. www.oregonlive.com/wildfires/20...

For some reason I was not aware of this FEMA dataset, USA Structures. It's shown in the new Qin and Voorheis (2026) NBER working paper about flood insurance. Parcel outlines, address, dwelling type, and other information for the whole country. gis-fema.hub.arcgis.com/pages/usa-st...

"Even without hurricanes, US disaster costs surpassed $100 billion last year." "More than half of 2025 disaster costs, $61 billion, were tied to the wildfires that burned in Los Angeles last January." www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/c...

"Cheap Solar Is Transforming Lives and Economies Across Africa" www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/c...

Newer planes are also nicer to ride in.

See also Watson, Guettabi, Reimer (2020), "Universal Cash and Crime" in ReStat.

Prospective PhD student interested in environmental, agricultural, or development economics? Consider applying to Oregon State University. Video explainer on our PhD program: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

These are huge effect sizes.

M. Nolan Grey has a great breakdown of California's SB 79, the bill signed last Friday to upzone neighborhoods and add housing near transit. mnolangray.substack.com/p/everything...

Increased immigration to the United States since 1965 may have increased innovation and wages by 5 percent. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Good infographic:

I don't like it but HIGH FREQUENCY, IN-PERSON assessments are the only way college students are going to learn anything this semester www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...

Impossible for me to see this study, which values trade-offs in urban green space and car space, and not think about the congestion pricing experience in New York. Ex-ante people were protective of car space, but ex-post everyone seems to like congestion pricing...

Developing a new method to answer whether environmental markets actually improve allocative efficiency. California's RECLAIM program improved allocative efficiency, but the US's NOx Budget Trading Program did not, from Kyle C. Meng and Vincent Thivierge https://www.nber.org/papers/w34111

I was not aware that a major driver of Indonesian deforestation is... American RV demand www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/w...

I didn’t appreciate that a downtown MAX tunnel in Portland would speed up *the whole system* by alleviating the main choke point. Cool video about it: youtu.be/OF2-lnj8vEQ

open.substack.com/pub/matthewe...

Top states by EV or plug-in electric hybrid share (as of 2023): CA: 4.5% DC: 3.8% HI: 3.0% WA: 2.8% OR: 2.4% NJ: 2.4%

Rent freezes are a major part of Zohran Mamdani's platform for NYC mayor. A nice review of the literature on the effects of rent control is Kholodilin (2024, J. Hous. Econ.) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨New @nber.org WP🚨 We use data on 42,000 households in #India to study how the agricultural sector copes w/ labour loss. As #farmers move to cities for higher wages, their left-behind families *don't* substitute with increased capital -- they downsize their farms. (1/2)

Oregon’s cap and trade would be modeled after Washington’s. Unlikely with only 5 weeks in the session, but would mean the whole West Coast under cap and trade.

First Street Foundation projected unhealthy air days over the next 15 years:

One consequence of restrictive development in urban cores: Most of the employment growth in the western US since 1990 has taken place in high wildfire hazard areas. Via Joiner, Walls, Wibbenmeyer 2025. media.rff.org/documents/Re...

RIP. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/c...

This paper was making the rounds, but did you notice it has a key contradiction? They divide cities into two groups (high and low housing supply constraints), and estimate the supply elasticity—how much quantities change in response to prices. Result: no difference! 1/

People have very low willingness to privately and voluntarily reduce their carbon footprint. Via Dechezleprêtre et al. (2025), "Fighting Climate Change: International Attitudes toward Climate Policies" www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

What’s the longest footnote you have ever read

When I got my current job one of my committee members, Olivier Deschênes, said to me: "In the winter Alaska is very dark, so there won't be much to do besides work. And in the summer, the sun is out all day -- which is great for working."

The funny thing about the logged x-axis is it shows that utility is concave in wealth

This is so odd to me. CoreLogic was a much better name.

Political Ideology and US EV adoption, by Davis, Li, Springel. Over 2012-23, EV adoption was driven by left-leaning areas, suggesting challenges in wider adoption. Will be interesting to see how Elon Musk might drive apolitical and right-wing consumers to adopt EVs. www.nber.org/papers/w33591

Earth's orbit is an open access resource. Satellites debris creates congestion and, unchecked, could render regions of orbit unusable ("Kessler syndrome"). @akhilrao.bsky.social and Rondina (2025) characterize the conditions under which this could occur. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

New NBER paper shows dramatic effects of NYC's congestion pricing in contrast with a set of control cities: A large reduction in travel times on roadways—average speeds increased by 15%—combined with a substantial reduction in vehicular emissions. www.nber.org/system/files...

Cool results by @reidtaylor.bsky.social, Erich Muehlegger. "The Effects of Competition in the Retail Gasoline Industry" • Entry of gas stations lowers nearby prices. • Effects are persistent. • Effects decline w/ distance. • No effect following nearby exits. www.nber.org/papers/w33569