Working Papers

Job Market Paper: The Value of Nature-Based Adaptation – Evidence that Urban Tree Cover Protects Revenue from Heat

[Link to Working Paper.] Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events, particularly in cities. This paper estimates the causal effect of temperature on daily revenue using nearly 15,000 consumer-facing storefronts in the 49 largest U.S. cities between 2019 and 2023. Revenue peaks between 35 and 37.5 °C (95–99.5 °F) and then falls steeply, averaging 9 percent lower on days at or above 40 °C (104 °F) than on 20 °C (68 °F) days. Consumption smoothing across days mitigates some damage from an extreme heat event, but cumulative revenue remains about 1.4 percent lower nearly two weeks after a hot day. Therefore, I estimate how effective urban green space is as a climate adaptation strategy that can prevent revenue losses caused by extreme heat. I find that a one percent increase in tree cover surrounding a storefront increases revenue by about 0.9 percent on hot days (≥ 37.5 °C). Raising surrounding tree cover from zero to 10 percent eliminates revenue losses at 37.5 °C and nearly halves them at 40 °C. Storefronts located in the Southwest and South have the most to gain from urban tree cover. On average, businesses in this region can cover the cost of moving to a 10 percent tree cover scenario in four years with the avoided revenue losses. This length of time shortens under projected climate scenarios. These results suggest that green infrastructure can improve firm resilience to heat, providing evidence of a private incentive to finance urban green space that could simultaneously provide a positive externality.

20 Years of Local Outdoor Recreation and Its Value to Americans

With Eli P. Fenichel

[Link to Working Paper.] The value of outdoor recreation regularly justifies public spending on “the great outdoors.” Yet 95 percent of recreation trips require an hour or less of round-trip travel. We develop an econometric approach that uses two decades of the American Time Use Survey (2003–2023) to produce repeated national estimates of the value of local recreation. A lower-bound estimate of willingness to pay per trip remained stable, between $5 and $6 (2023 USD), while national annual willingness to pay rose 63 percent, from $57.0 to $93.2 billion, driven by rising participation and population growth. Short trips to play with pets or children, walk, or socialize account for about 80 percent of outdoor recreation trips, yet these high-frequency activities are largely absent from the valuation literature. A relative price change framework, combined with weak complementarity, implies that publicly accessible outdoor spaces have not become scarcer, consistent with sustainable management nationally.

Measuring the Value of Outdoor Recreation for National Environmental-Economic Statistics

With Jorge Forero Fajardo and Eli P. Fenichel

[Link to Working Paper.] The 2025 System of National Accounts establishes that comprehensive expenditure measurement across accounting boundaries can support welfare assessment. For ecosystem services like outdoor recreation, this requires comprehensive partitioning of expenditure between the System of National Accounts (SNA) boundary for market transactions and the household production boundary for travel time. Current U.S. satellite accounts fail to do this. The Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account captures only market expenditures for distant trips, while the Household Production Satellite Account excludes recreation entirely. We use detailed U.S. coastal recreation data to partition travel costs across these boundaries and quantify the resulting measurement gaps. Our central finding is that outdoor recreation is primarily a household-produced service. Travel time, not market purchases, represents the major expenditure. Household production values are approximately twice market expenditures, meaning assessments based only on market spending underestimate recreation’s contribution to well-being by roughly threefold. Including recreation travel time would increase the Household Production Satellite Account by 4–5 percent nationally ($12.4 billion in the Gulf Region, or 0.7 percent of regional GDP). These measurement gaps have policy consequences: benefit-cost analyses that rely solely on market expenditures systematically understate recreation benefits, potentially leading to underinvestment in environmental protection and recreational infrastructure.

Work in Progress

Two Wedges and No Wire: Externalities in Virtual Fence Adoption

With Katherine Lee and Sophie Gilbert

Virtual fence (VF) technologies have the potential to lower private costs for cattle producers and create the conditions to provide environmental co-benefits more easily. However, we show that decentralized adoption is inefficiently low. We develop a two-stage model of VF adoption among heterogeneous producers to characterize how two distinct market failures drive a wedge between private and social incentives to adopt. We model how uncertainty about VF’s private benefits creates a transitory learning externality that dissipates as learning resolves uncertainty about VF’s performance. However, we also show that even after uncertainty is fully resolved, producers may not use VF for conservation management unless they are compensated for additional environmental benefits they generate. This environmental externality is persistent even under complete information. We distinguish additional conservation from conservation producers would undertake on their own, since efficient payments should target only the conservation that would not occur without a payment. We decompose the total welfare loss from decentralized adoption of VF into a transitory learning loss and a persistent conservation loss, and show that a producer-differentiated payment equal to the social value of additional conservation closes the environmental wedge. We use this framework to evaluate existing VF adoption subsidies and conservation programs and argue that policy will eventually need to shift from subsidizing early adoption toward payments for additional conservation as learning resolves uncertainty.

Valuing Soil as Natural Capital: The Shadow Price of Soil Organic Matter in U.S. Agriculture

With Mark Bradford, Eli P. Fenichel, Michael Meneses, and Alexander Polussa

We estimate the economic value of soil organic matter as a natural capital input to the production of major U.S. field crops. Because soil organic matter is a stock that responds to management and in turn affects yields, its value is not directly observed. We recover its shadow price from farmers’ observed choices of crops, tillage, and cover cropping across the contiguous United States.

Virtual Fencing and Riparian Conservation on Western Rangelands

Supported by the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC)

I use spatial boundaries from virtual fence projects across the western United States and satellite vegetation data in riparian buffers to measure whether virtual fence grazing management improves riparian habitat.

Who Captures the Conservation Rent? Market Power and Subscription Pricing in Virtual Fence Technology

Virtual fence is a proprietary technology supplied by a concentrated set of vendors, many of which sell access by subscription rather than outright ownership. This paper investigates how vendor market power and contract form determine who captures the gains from conservation contracts that depend on the technology. Subscription relaxes ranchers’ credit constraints and can expand adoption, but it leaves the vendor holding the verification data, exposing ranchers who sign conservation contracts to hold-up. This paper asks how much of a conservation subsidy for virtual fence adoption becomes conservation rather than vendor revenue under various contract designs.

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 mitigate climate change, ecosystem services, and biodiversity loss. My research examines how natural resources influence 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, which involve observing 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 the necessity of sustainable management of natural resources for the well-being of people 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, “The Value of Nature-Based Adaptation: Evidence that Tree Cover Protects Urban Revenue from Heat,” I find that urban green space sustains local business revenue during extreme heat events. 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. This paper outlines my broader research approach, which involves observing people’s revealed preferences for nature, examining how these preferences influence private returns, and identifying situations where businesses have a private incentive to finance investments in green infrastructure.

This paper contributes to several strands of literature on climate adaptation, nature-based solutions, and urban economics. It addresses a central gap in the climate adaptation literature: the lack of evidence on private, ex-ante adaptation returns outside of agriculture, health, and labor. My job market paper provides the first large-scale, daily, storefront-level evidence on how heat shocks affect the service sector—a major component of the economy. I then show that urban tree cover protects firms’ revenue from extreme heat. By quantifying how the magnitude of tree cover’s return varies across regions and under warmer climate scenarios, my job market paper identifies where adaptation is currently most valuable and how its benefits scale with continued warming. In doing so, it links the literatures on adaptation and natural capital. Together, these contributions position urban green space not only as an environmental amenity but also as a productive asset that sustains private-sector performance under climate stress.

My interest in ecosystem services is motivated by the need to incorporate non-market services into national statistics. A significant portion of my research agenda is focused on outdoor recreation, particularly local recreation, which is one of the most widely consumed ecosystem services but is often overlooked 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 that people give up to engage in recreation. Similarly, the Household Production Satellite Account includes services that individuals produce for themselves using 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 accounts for 77 percent of recreation trips) is barely represented in the Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account, as it only considers market expenditure and overlooks 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 developed from 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 utilized nationwide mobility data to examine park use during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and found that people of color and immigrants reduced their park visits more than white domestic recreators, suggesting a 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 that they were equitably distributed across income groups but disproportionately favored 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, illustrating how these values are distributed through households, firms, and fiscal systems. I have three primary tracks for future research.

First, I have multiple research questions about how to adapt to climate change. This work extends from my job market paper. 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 have found preliminary evidence that extreme heat leads to additional tax revenue raised from alcohol sales. I plan to ask how heat interacts with drinking, and how that interaction influences heat-related crime. Third, 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 foster an understanding of how climate adaptation strategies can mitigate inequities while being economically efficient.

Second, my future 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 accessible. Finally, I will investigate how social forms of recreation generate positive externalities in parks, thereby challenging congestion-based views in the recreation literature.

Third, I aim to expand my research agenda to the valuation of biodiversity by examining how conservation actions, such as wetland protection by birders, generate spillover benefits for surrounding communities, including flood protection and enhanced 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.