Dan Garrett

PhD students working on projects in the crime & criminal justice space (empirical w/ a causal focus) - see below for a fun workshop in October! Will be a great opportunity for feedback and networking with other scholars.

Rent (musical) - Wikipedia

The musical kinds: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_(m...

There is some great discussion by one of my dissertation committee members, Jimmy Roberts who happens to be an excellent industrial organization economist, around claim #4.

Market concentration and market power, while sometimes correlated, are not the same thing.

Lexington, KY

Excited to announce the call for papers for the inaugural MidSouth Education Policy Workshop, October 16-17, in Lexington, KY!

Send us your abstracts on all things econ of ed & ed policy by 8/27. Grad students & early career folks especially welcome!

Info & link to submit here: bit.ly/44TdiGf

38 states have legalized sports betting, but little is known about the financial, social, and behavioral impacts.

@arnoldventures.bsky.social is committed to building the evidence base with our newest RFP.

LOIs due 9/15 and details here: www.arnoldventures.org/causal-resea...

As an amateur appreciator of urban amenities, I just arrived in Vancouver and the Canada Line train into the city is so nice. Easy to use, clean, and right on time.

👇👇👇

Next up, I’ll be presenting “Who Labels and What's Priced? Evidence from Third-Party ESG Assessments in the Municipal Bond Market” where we explore environmental, social, and sustainability labels using an unexpected information release in 2023 through Bloomberg

(papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....)

Discussant @ivantivanov.bsky.social (Chicago Fed) focuses on the growth of “alternative trading systems” (ATS) that dealers have increasingly used since about 2010. Some questions remain about how ATS interacts with reciprocity

First paper: Casey Dougal (FSU) tells us about muni dealer networks in “Dealer Quid Pro Quo in the Municipal Bond Market.” The paper finds, on average, dealers that trade back and forth (reciprocal trades) have low execution costs, but effect flips on the periphery

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

14th annual Municipal Finance Conference | Brookings

It’s Day 2 of the Brookings Muni Finance Conference (livestream: www.brookings.edu/events/14th-...)! I will be live tweeting a lot less today but the papers—including my own paper on green muni bonds—will hopefully be just as good as yesterday

Melissa Winkler (Crosswalk Labs) discusses the paper and starts by noting that it looks like markets are doing what they are supposed to. Coal’s decline led to decreased fiscal stability and markets priced that risk. She also brings up a lot of forward looking questions on future energy transitions

Last paper: “Navigating Structural Change: Evidence from Municipal Finances and Bond Market Pricing During the Coal Transition” presented by Marcelo Ochoa. The large decline in coal production following from the fracking boom in the US was priced in munis and led to local fiscal distress

Discussant Francesco Ruggieri (UChicago) zooms in on nonlinearities in the NYC property tax system: assessment growth caps interact interestingly with property tax relief. Dynamic welfare implications not obvious.

The basic idea: hurricane Sandy had a massive deleterious effect on property values in NYC for damaged properties, but property tax assessments adjust these values down for property taxes less, leading to increases in the taxable ratio (especially damaged properties ineligible for tax relief)

The final paper session of the day is also on climate risk and the energy transition. First up is “Rising Waters, Falling Taxes: The Impact of Hurricane Sandy on Property Tax Assessments in New York City” presented by Yilin Hou

Discussant Brian McCartan (Ceres) zeros in on *operational changes* that can be functions of climate events/disasters, and called this research filling in specific causal chains between climate risks and fiscal impacts underexplored. With limited resources, important work. How to inform adaptation?

But wildfires cause more than just direct damage! Luis Lopez (UIC) presents “Up in Smoke: The Impact of Wildfire Pollution on Healthcare Municipal Finance” documenting that the smoke from wildfires is priced in the bonds of hospitals and nursing homes (more negative profitability services)

This also inspired a good discussion among the crowd (and another great discussion from Erika Smull of Breckenridge). Lots of suggestions of other things that could be going on. Some surprise at lack of term structure adjustment or adaptation given very large price effects.

After congestion pricing, back to muni bonds. Woongchan Jeon presented “Pricing Climate Risks: Evidence from Wildfires and Municipal Bonds” arguing that wildfire risks are being increasingly price over time (following the Goldsmith-Pinkham et al. sea level rise paper)

Rich Ryffel (Purdue, moderating the panel) then admits that he really likes congestion pricing as both (1) a solution to congestion externalities from cars and (2) as a method of raising transit revenue. Dual purpose a lot like tobacco taxes. Asks the panel “is there a better way?”

Baye Larsen of Moody’s brings up how local, state, and federal support may or may not replace lost fares. She documents that fares are less reliable, and that large reliance on fares used to be seen as a credit strength but less so now if they aren’t reliable.

Rethinking Public Procurement The Hidden Drivers of High Costs and Strategies for Reform

I think much of Kirsten Chalke’s discussion is echoing a lot of numbers that I think are coming from @arpitrage.bsky.social’s insights: arpitrage.substack.com/p/rethinking...

(She mentioned “a NYU professor” so apologies if I’m misattributing)

Gabrielle Facquet (Morgan Stanley) and Kirsten Chalke (Jeffries) talk about the financial position of transit agencies: cost differentials are huge relative to the rest of the world and deferred maintenance has ballooned post COVID. (I don’t have their slides to share, sorry)

Back from lunch, time for the first panel: has congestion pricing’s time come?

Ben Zou (Notre Dame) starts the conversation off with some overview of evidence from where congestion pricing is used in the world (he does use the word “success”)

Discussant Win Smith from Wells Fargo is very interested in the nature of autocorrelation of outcomes across years and leakage between model and test data, but notes this work is extremely important and the models show lots of promise.

Chaowang Ren just presented a new paper testing out a bunch of models for predicting municipal financial distress. There is some compelling evidence that certain machine learning methods can improve distress predictions.

Now time for the really fun stuff: muni transaction costs! Simon Wu of the MSRB describes how trade data show effective spreads declining dramatically over time (discussed by Brad Wendt). Lot of discussion about the pattern in the room. Many proposed reasons (ATS, SMAs, reporting, etc)

Does mention that retention and hiring challenges for state and local entities are real.

Discussant Michael Nadol suggests the paper lines up with his experience (wages and total comp declining for state and local workers), but thinks the paper masks a lot of very interesting “micro” stories facing individual sectors like policing and teachers.