Optimal real estate capital durability and localized climate change disaster risk.

The durability of the real estate capital stock could hinder climate change adaptation because past construction anchors the population in beautiful and productive but increasingly-risky coastal areas. However, coastal developers anticipate that their assets face increasing risk and this creates an incentive to seek adaptation strategies. This paper models climate change as a joint process of (1) increasingly destructive storms and (2) a risk of sea-level rise that submerges coastal property. We study how forward-looking developers and real estate investors respond to the new risks along a number of dimensions including their choices of location, capital durability, capital mobility (modular real estate), and maintenance of existing properties. The net effect of such investments is a more resilient urban population.

Entrepreneurship, Information, and Growth.

We examine the contribution to economic growth of entrepreneurial "marketplace information" within a regional endogenous growth framework. Entrepreneurs are posited to provide an input to economic growth through the information revealed by their successes and failures. We empirically identify this information source with the regional variation in establishment births and deaths, which create geographic information asymmetries that influence subsequent entrepreneurial activity and economic growth. We find that local establishment birth and death rates are significantly and positively correlated with subsequent entrepreneurship for US counties. To account for the potential endogeneity caused by forward-looking entrepreneurs, we utilize instruments based on historic mining activity. We find that the information spillover component of local establishment birth and death rates have significant positive effects on subsequent entrepreneurship and employment growth for US counties and metropolitan areas. With the help of these intruments, we show that establishment births have a positive and significant effect on future employment growth within all counties, and that in line with the information hypothesis, local establishment death rates have a similar positive effect within metropolitan counties.