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 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.

Municipal bond markets began pricing sea-level rise (SLR) exposure risk in 2013, coinciding with upward revisions to worst-case SLR projections and accompanying uncertainty around these projections. The effect is larger for long-maturity bonds and not solely driven by near-term flood risk. We use a structural model of credit risk to quantify the implied economic impact and distinguish between the effects of underlying asset values and of uncertainty. The SLR exposure premium exhibits a trend different from house prices and is unaffected by house price controls. Together, our results highlight the importance of climate uncertainty in driving municipal bond prices. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online