ARE PhD students Will Troske and Greg Boudreaux each presented ongoing work as a part of the 3rd Year Prospectus Brown Bag series, which allows ARE students to workshop the ideas that will (or may) make up their prospectus. 

Will's work studies location-based pollution regulations in maritime shipping, which offer unclear incentives for compliance. Emission Control Areas (ECAs) locally regulate pollutants in maritime shipping. While ECA reduced allowed pollutants, the mobile nature of ships makes the response to the regulation unclear. His project aims to understand how ships complied with the ECA. He first uses an event study approach to estimate how ships make short-run operational changes to quantify the immediate impact, and then estimates pricing impacts using a dynamic model of firm entry and capital investment.

Greg's work studies how Arctic communities migrate in response to environmental hazards. Economic models of migration predict that individuals make tradeoffs between expected wages, housing costs, and locational amenities when deciding where to live. Climate change-induced environmental degradation can alter these amenities, influencing decisions to stay or relocate. This is especially relevant in Arctic environments, where rapid permafrost thaw and coastal erosion have already forced multiple communities to relocate. This project examines how individuals migrate in response to environmental change, and what these decisions can tell us about the economic benefits of costly adaptation projects. Using community-year wage and migration flow data for the universe of Alaskan communities, along with remote-sensed measures of permafrost thaw and coastal erosion, he will estimate a model of migration to quantify these effects.