Working Papers
Job Market Paper: Revenue Under Heat: The Value of Urban Green Space
[Link to Working Paper.] Extreme heat is becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change, particularly in cities where the urban heat island effect amplifies high temperatures. This paper estimates the causal effect of temperature on daily revenue at over 15,000 consumer-facing storefronts in the 49 largest U.S. metro areas between 2019 and 2023, with a focus on how green space can mitigate revenue loss caused by extreme heat. I find that revenue begins to decline on days with a maximum temperature above 35°C (95°F) and drops by 9 percent on days above 37.5°C (99.5°F) relative to the average revenue on a 20°C (68°F) day. Substituting spending across days mitigates some damage from an extreme heat event, but a 1.3 percent revenue drop is persistent for two weeks following an extremely hot day. Because temporal substitution does not completely mitigate the negative effect of extreme heat, I examine the role of urban green space as a climate adaptation strategy. Using variation in greenery around storefronts belonging to the same brand within a city, I find that a one percent increase in surrounding green space raises revenue by 1.78 percent on extremely hot days: 0.96 percent from general amenity value and 0.82 percent from its cooling effect. These results suggest that green infrastructure can improve firm resilience to heat, providing evidence of a private incentive to finance public urban green space that could simultaneously provide a positive externality.
The National Value of Local Outdoor Recreation over the Past 20 Years
[Link to Working Paper.] I measure the benefits of local outdoor recreation in the United States over 2003-2023 and show how conclusions depend on how travel time is priced. Using the American Time Use Survey to estimate a travel-cost model, I estimate (i) welfare-based willingness to pay, which values travel time at one-third of own wage, and (ii) accounting values that price the realized service (travel) at a replacement wage consistent with household production accounts. Average value per trip is stable at roughly $15-$18 (2023 USD) regardless of pricing technique, with temporary increases around the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. Scaling by trips and population, national annual value rises by about $100 billion over two decades. In 2022, it totals $216-$241 billion, far exceeding typical municipal park investments. In contrast to average and aggregated value, distributional results depend on the modeling choice of how to price time. While aggregate time trends are similar under both approaches, using a replacement wage compresses the richest-to-poorest quintile ratio in per-trip value from about 10:1 to 1.5:1. The method produces a scalable, repeatable measure of local recreation benefits and connects non-market valuation with accounting-consistent pricing.
Work in Progress
Measuring the Value of Outdoor Recreation for National Environmental-Economic Statistics (with Eli P. Fenichel and Jorge Forero Fajardo).
Publications
Creel A. M. (2025). Muller et al., eds., Measuring and Accounting for Environmental Public Goods, Chap. 7 Comment. National Bureau of Economic Research Book, University of Chicago Press.
Creel, S., Creel, N. M., Creel, A. M., & Creel, B. M. (2016). Hunting on a hot day: effects of temperature on interactions between African wild dogs and their prey. Ecology, 97(11), 2910-2916.
Research Statement
I am an environmental economist who estimates the non-market value of nature-based adaptation solutions to climate change, ecosystem services, and biodiversity. My research investigates how natural resources shape people’s well-being and economic activity in ways that are often invisible in traditional economic statistics. My work estimates these unknown values using revealed preference techniques, meaning I observe how people trade off money and time to access nature, and how firms and governments, in turn, capture value from those choices. My research agenda aims to integrate the value of nature that I estimate into the systems that measure welfare, business performance, and fiscal health. This integration is important because it highlights how sustainable management of natural resources is necessary for people’s well-being and economic outcomes.
My research requires building novel datasets that link human behavior to the surrounding environment. I combine nontraditional behavioral data, such as credit card transactions, mobility records, and time-use surveys, with high-resolution environmental measures (e.g., remotely sensed GIS data). By building these large datasets, I can estimate how environmental conditions causally affect welfare and economic activity, reveal who gains and who loses from those effects, and integrate those insights into systems of economic measurement and policy. Additionally, this data-intensive approach enables my work to carefully examine how environmental benefits can vary across demographics, geographic space, and time.
In my job market paper, Revenue Under Heat: The Value of Urban Green Space, I show that urban green space not only buffers consumers from extreme heat but also sustains local business revenue. I combine daily credit card transaction data from over 15,000 storefronts in the 49 largest U.S. metropolitan areas with high-resolution temperature and tree canopy measures. Leveraging within-store variation in daily maximum temperatures, I find that revenue drops by 9 percent on extremely hot days (above 99.5 °F). Using spatial variation in green space across businesses that are a part of the same brand in the same city, I find that moving from no tree canopy to high tree canopy cover (zero to 10 percent coverage) fully offsets the revenue loss from a 99.5 °F day and halves the loss from a 104 °F day.
I estimate how quickly additional revenue from moving to a high green space scenario can offset a business’s costs of expanding tree canopy under different climate scenarios. Under the most conservative estimate, I find that a business can recuperate the cost of increasing tree canopy cover in under five years. The period required to recuperate costs decreases under more severe climate scenarios. This result demonstrates how firms have a private incentive to invest in nature-based adaptation strategies to climate change. This paper illustrates my broader research approach: observing people’s revealed preferences for nature, uncovering how that preference shapes private revenue, and identifying that businesses have a private incentive to finance nature-based adaptation solutions to climate change.
My interest in ecosystem services is motivated by the need to incorporate non-market services into national statistics. A large part of my research agenda is focused on outdoor recreation, especially local recreation, which is one of the most widely consumed ecosystem services but is largely invisible in traditional economic statistics. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has a satellite account for outdoor recreation, but it does not include the value of time people give up to recreate. Similarly, the Household Production Satellite Account includes services individuals produce for themselves with their own time but excludes recreation (even though it meets the definition of household production).
In a working paper, Measuring the Value of Outdoor Recreation for National Environmental-Economic Statistics (with Eli P. Fenichel and Jorge Forero Fajardo), I show how current BEA accounting boundaries obscure the value of recreation. Using coastal recreation data, we partition expenditures between the System of National Accounts and household production accounting boundaries. We find that market spending (e.g., gas, equipment, lodging) represents only one-third of total travel costs, with the majority being individuals’ travel time. As a result, local recreation (which makes up 77 percent of recreation trips) barely appears in the Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account because it only accounts for market expenditure and ignores travel time. The Household Production Satellite Account does include travel time when estimating the value of different services people produce for themselves, but it does not include outdoor recreation. If the travel time for all recreation trips were included in the Household Production Satellite Account, the value of household production in the U.S. would rise by 4 to 5 percent (equivalent to increasing GDP by 0.6 to 0.7 percent). This work exemplifies my approach to environmental-economic measurement: using revealed-preference methods to make nature’s contribution to welfare visible, measurable, and ultimately incorporated into official statistics.
In another paper, The National Value of Local Outdoor Recreation over the Past 20 Years, I provide the first long-run, nationally representative estimates of willingness to pay for local recreation in the U.S. I find that the average value per trip remains stable at roughly $15–$18 (2023 USD), with temporary increases around the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. Scaling by trips and population, the national annual value rises by about $100 billion over two decades, totaling $216–$241 billion in 2022, far exceeding typical municipal park investments. In contrast to these aggregate values, the distributional results depend on how travel time is priced. Using a replacement wage, rather than an opportunity cost based on income, compresses the richest-to-poorest quintile ratio in per-trip value from about 10:1 to 1.5:1. This approach yields a scalable, repeatable measure of recreation benefits that aligns non-market valuation with national accounting principles, advancing efforts to integrate ecosystem services into official measures of economic welfare.
My interest in how environmental benefits and costs are distributed across demographics, space, and time grew out of formative research experiences. As a research assistant for Kerwin Charles, I examined whether the closure of Black hospitals during integration narrowed the Black–White infant mortality gap and found no measurable effect. This was an early lesson in testing whether well-intentioned policies deliver equitable outcomes. In my master’s thesis, I used nationwide mobility data to study park use during the early months of COVID-19 and found that people of color and immigrants reduced park visits more than white domestic recreators, suggesting greater reliance on social forms of outdoor recreation. Later, as an intern at Resources for the Future, I analyzed Land and Water Conservation Fund grants and found them equitably distributed across income groups but disproportionately favoring white counties. Together, these experiences underscored the need to pair efficiency-based measures with distributional analysis to understand how public goods affect welfare in heterogeneous ways.
Going Forward: My research will continue to quantify the welfare gains from ecosystem services and the costs of environmental degradation, showing how these values flow through households, firms, and fiscal systems.
One line of work will advance the measurement of recreation’s value for national statistics. I plan to translate recreation trips into land-based measures of service flows for integration into natural capital accounts. I will also examine how recreation functions as a welfare “backstop” during crises (e.g., recessions or pandemics) when budgets are constrained but access to local green space remains essential. Building on my COVID park-use research, I will study how social forms of recreation generate positive externalities in parks, challenging congestion-based views in the recreation literature.
A second line of inquiry will extend my job market paper by examining how climate adaptation interacts with equity and efficiency. First, I plan to use credit card and mobility data to estimate the public costs of food deserts under extreme heat, analyzing how environmental stress amplifies the burdens faced by low-income households and marginalized groups in securing everyday necessities. Second, I will evaluate the cost-effectiveness of alternative adaptation strategies to extreme heat, comparing interventions such as urban tree planting and reflective surface treatments. Together, these projects build on the empirical framework developed in my job market paper but move toward understanding how climate adaptation strategies can mitigate inequities and be economically efficient.
Finally, I aim to extend my work to the valuation of biodiversity by examining how conservation actions, such as wetland protection by birders, create spillover benefits for surrounding communities, including flood protection and climate resilience.
Together, these projects will advance my research agenda: developing environmental-economic statistics that reveal the hidden value of nature, inform equitable policy design, and support investment in natural infrastructure.