Publications
“The Canary in the Coal Decline: Appalachian Household Finance and the Transition from Fossil Fuels” (with Joshua Blonz and Erin Troland) Journal of Financial Economics, 2026, Vol. 175, 104167, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2025.104167.
Media: Energy Institute Blog, BLS Monthly Labor Review
“The Local Economic Impact of Natural Disasters” (with Daniel J. Wilson) in Journal of Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2025, Vol. 23, No. 6, 1667-1704. https://doi.org/10.1086/735533.
Media: Wall Street Journal
“Pricing Poseidon: Extreme Weather Uncertainty and Firm Return Dynamics“, (with Mathias Kruttli and Sumudu W. Watugala), in Journal of Finance, 2025, Vol. 80, No. 2, 783-832. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.13416.
“Sellin’ in the Rain: Weather, Climate, and Retail Sales“, in Management Science, 2023, Vol. 69, No. 12, 7151-7882.
Final accepted working paper, online appendix
“Divest, Disregard or Double Down? Philanthropic Endowment Investments in Objectionable Firms“, in American Economic Review: Insights, 2019, Vol. 1, No. 2, 241-256.
Press Mentions: Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Economist
“Discounting Behavior and Environmental Decisions” (with Richard T. Carson), in Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, 2009, Vol. 2, No. 2, 112-130.
Working Papers
“Flooding the Market? How hurricanes impact home listings“ (with Brian Seok)
ABSTRACT: The lack of an emerging consensus regarding how home prices respond to natural disasters presents a puzzle: Why do some analyses find increases while others find decreases? We develop a model illustrating how transaction composition shifts between “safe” and “risky” homes can yield positive price effect estimates and declining quantities even when shocks decrease values of homes more broadly. Using property-level disaster risk, treatment, and real estate listing and sales data, we implement a novel approach focusing on listings started immediately before an event in order to limit the role of selection bias. In this sample, we find non-elevated flooded homes are 10 percent less likely to sell while elevated homes in the wider region are 1.4 percent more likely to sell. Listings for non-elevated flooded homes that do end up selling spend over five weeks more on the market and are nine percent more likely to sell at large discounts. We further find that flooded homes listed after the year landfall are more likely to have elevated foundations and less likely to have upgraded features. We also find support for the hypothesis that disasters cause shrink housing market supply, as local projections point to temporary disruptions in listings and sales that are not made up later. These supply effects are more pronounced in more severely flooded Census tracts. Extreme weather events can cause sample selection bias in sales, a phenomenon known as “transaction bias” that can skew price effect estimates and may explain some of the disagreement in the price effect research.
Brigitte Roth Tran, Ph.D. 