Homes exposed to sea level rise (SLR) sell for approximately 7% less than observably equivalent unexposed properties equidistant from the beach. This discount has grown over time and is driven by sophisticated buyers and communities worried about global warming. Consistent with causal identification of long-horizon SLR costs, we find no relation between SLR exposure and rental rates and a 4% discount among properties not projected to be flooded for almost a century. Our findings contribute to the literature on the pricing of long-run risky cash flows and provide insights for optimal climate change policy.

We use the founding of the Federal Reserve to identify the effects of a lender of last resort. We examine stock return and interest rate volatility during September and October, when markets were vulnerable because of financial stringency from the harvest. Stock volatility fell by 40% and interest rate volatility by more than 70% following the monetary regime change. The drop is insignificant if major panic years are omitted from the analysis, however. Because business cycle downturns occurred in the same year as financial crises, our results suggest that the existence of the Federal Reserve reduced liquidity risk.

We study how state pension windfalls affect property prices near state borders, where theory suggests real estate reflects the value of additional public resources. Windfalls, representing a source of state revenue about half the size of total taxes, provide economically significant and plausibly exogenous variation in fiscal conditions. We find that each dollar of pension asset returns increases border house prices by approximately two dollars, suggesting that governments allocate additional funds towards high-value projects or tax abatement rather than wasting incremental resources. Evidence of larger effects in financially constrained municipalities highlights how fiscal resources amplify welfare effects of economic shocks.

Is climate change partisanship reflected in residential decisions? Comparing individual properties in the same zip code with similar elevation and proximity to the coast, houses exposed to sea level rise (SLR) are increasingly more likely to be owned by Republicans and less likely to be owned by Democrats. We find a partisan residency gap for even moderately SLR exposed properties of more than 5 percentage points, which has more than doubled over the past six years. Findings are unchanged controlling flexibly for other individual demographics and a variety of granular property characteristics, including the value of the home. Residential sorting manifests among owners regardless of occupancy, but not among renters, and is driven by long-run SLR exposure but not current flood risk. Anticipatory sorting on climate change suggests that households that are most likely to vote against climate friendly policies and least likely to adapt may ultimately bear the burden of climate change.