Justin Gallagher
Associate Professor, Department of Agricultural Economics & Economics
Montana State University
My Primary research field is environmental economics, with a broad interest in household finance, labor economics, and public economics. The central theme of my research is investigating how individuals evaluate and respond to environmental risks.
In a recent paper, Paul Fisher and I show that a standard, widely used methodology in the traffic safety engineering literature–the Empirical Bayes model–leads to biased traffic safety estimates. The bias is a result of the model’s failure to correct for regression to the mean bias. This paper helps to explain why our previous study of red light safety cameras concludes that the traffic safety benefit of camera programs is much smaller than the consensus view in the existing transportation and engineering literatures. Read media coverage from Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, Scientific American, Sound of Ideas (NPR, WCPN), and U.S. News & World Report.
In the working paper Natural Disasters, Local Bank Market Share, and Economic Recovery (Climate Risk Management Conference Presentation Slides) Daniel Hartley and I show that regions with a higher concentration of national banking institutions at the time of a natural disaster have greater post-disaster lending (as compared to locations with more local banking institutions). We instrument for the concentration of local banking using the timing of state banking deregulation. Our results highlight the under-recognized role that the type of banking instition has in providing credit following a natural disaster.
