• Visiting "America's Best Idea": Demand for the U.S. National Park System (Link)

The U.S. National Park System receives 300 million visits each year, generating surplus for visitors and supporting parks and surrounding communities. I build a versatile model of demand for US national parks, using nationally representative telephone surveys, fifteen years of park-level visitor counts, and a statistical atlas describing park attributes. Using a novel estimation and calibration procedure, I control for substitution between parks while rigorously identifying marginal willingness to pay for environmental amenities. The model produces a park awesomeness index that controls for travel costs and consistently ranks iconic parks like Glacier, Rocky Mountain, and Yellowstone in the top-10. Observable park attributes explain 51% of variation in the index. Temperature drives visitation more than any other attribute, and anticipated temperatures influence visitation decisions more than four times as much as short-run deviations from average temperatures. This framework has broad applications to challenges facing the National Park System, including wildfire and crowd management strategies.

• Causal Inference, High-Frequency Data, and the Recreational Value of Water Quality (Link)

with Hyunjung Kim

• Willingness to Pay to Avoid Crowding on Public Beaches

with Frank Lupi, Caroline Tompson, and Roger von Haefen

• Weather and College Student Achievement

with Raghav Rakesh

• Temporary Migration and the Climate Refugia of the United States

with John Reaves