Work in progress

Pricing strategic responses in real estate markets with Hedonic methods
(with D. Kelly and C. Timmins)

Whale dynamics and carbon sequestration potential
(with M. Savoca and J.C. Villaseñor-Derbez)

Working papers

The Economic Impacts of Hurricanes on Fisheries in the United States

[Under Review]
(with J. Agar and J.C. Villaseñor-Derbez) Link

Hurricanes routinely hit the Southeastern United States, bringing with them widespread destruction that hinders fishing operations. Previous work quantifying the economic costs of hurricanes focused on capital destruction or supply-chain bottlenecks, ignoring the first step in the supply chain: fisheries production. Here, we quantify of the economic toll of hurricanes on commercial fisheries production. Using a novel, high-frequency county-level panel linking daily commercial landings and revenue to hurricane exposure from 2005 to 2022, we show that extreme county-level wind exposure reduces landings and revenue by up to 60 and 70%, respectively. We estimate cumulative revenue losses of over $160 million over 2005–2022 due to hurricanes before including any capital losses in the sector. These findings underscore the persistent vulnerability of coastal fisheries to extreme weather and provide an empirical foundation for targeted disaster preparedness and climate adaptation policy.

No Calm Before the Storm: Typhoons, Shipping, and Trade

(with K. Abe, K. Tanaka, and J.C. Villaseñor-Derbez) Link

Extreme weather is becoming more frequent and severe worldwide, yet its consequences for global trade channels remain an open question. This paper quantifies the cost of extreme weather to maritime trade. Integrating daily typhoon wind-swath data with hundreds of thousands of vessel voyages in Japanese waters, we document that maritime traffic falls by up to roughly 50% on typhoon-exposed open-ocean cells and by about 7% at typhoon-exposed ports. A voyage-level framework identifies $119 million in direct shipping-industry costs over 2013–2021. This disruption implies a total trade-volume welfare loss of $118 million. Combining the two channels yields a central total welfare estimate of approximately $237 million. As climate change intensifies, the invisible costs associated with increased extreme weather will scale accordingly, highlighting a vital dimension of climate risk that remains overlooked by adaptation frameworks focused solely on catastrophic land-based destruction.

The Social Value of Predicting Hurricanes

[Forthcoming at AEJ: Economic Policy]
(with I. Rudik) Link
Coverage: NBER NPR - Marketplace (1) NPR - Marketplace (2) Planet Money - The Indicator Yale - Climate Connections
Some More News

What is the impact and value of hurricane forecasts? We study this question using newly-collected forecast data for the universe of land-falling US hurricanes between 2005–2022. We find higher wind speed forecasts increase pre-landfall protective spending. Erroneous under-forecasts of wind speed increase hurricane damage and after-hurricane rebuilding expenditures. Our main contribution is a new theoretically-grounded approach for estimating the marginal value of forecast improvements. We find that the average annual improvement reduced total per-hurricane costs, inclusive of unobserved protective spending, by over $500,000 per county. Improvements since 2007 reduced costs by 19%, averaging $2 billion per hurricane. This exceeds the annual budget for all federal weather forecasting.

The Economic and Environmental Cost of Pirate Avoidance

[R&R at Nature Communications]
(with G. McDermott, G. McDonald, J.C. Villaseñor-Derbez)

Modern-day piracy remains a pervasive problem for the global maritime industry, yet its full economic costs and underlying mechanisms are largely unquantified. We explore this problem by pairing detailed pirate-encounter records with satellite tracking from more than 22 million shipping voyages between 2012 and 2023. Here, we show that vessels systematically reroute around recent encounters, with associated excess travel costs of over US$200 million per year and additional environmental damages of nearly US$582 million annually.

Hurricane Hunters and the Economic Value of Augmented Observations for Hurricane Forecasts

(with D. Cardoso, I. Rudik, D. Nolan, and M. DeMaria)

The Health Cost of Unexpected Shocks

(with A. Hollingsworth and I. Rudik) [Available upon request]

Extreme events often impose severe health costs when they arrive unexpectedly. This paper examines how forecast accuracy mitigates these impacts, using hurricanes as a natural experiment. Using county-level mortality data covering all US landfalling hurricanes between 2005 and 2022, we find that stronger wind exposure and forecast underpredictions both significantly increase elderly mortality, with effects persisting up to three months after landfall. A one m/s increase in wind speed raises deaths among individuals aged 85 and older by 1.6 per 100,000, while underestimating wind speeds by 8–10 m/s produces roughly 40 excess deaths per 100,000. We estimate more accurate forecast predictions generate between $27 to $57 million in counties exposed to hurricane-force winds.

Transboundary Marine Protected Areas as Adaptation to Climate Change

(with W. Cheung and J. Palacios-Abrantes) Link

Marine ecosystems often span political boundaries, posing challenges for effective conservation and fisheries governance. We develop a dynamic bioeconomic model of transboundary fisheries management and assess how strategically placed marine protected areas (TMPAs) can mitigate the inefficiencies of decentralized decision-making. We calibrate the model using projections from a Dynamic Bioclimatic Envelope Model (DBEM) covering 43 species in the Tropical Eastern Pacific region under two climate scenarios (SSP1-2.6, SSP5-8.5). Our results highlight the conditions under which TMPAs improve welfare and conservation outcomes even in the absence of formal cooperation. These insights are timely as climate-driven range shifts alter the spatial distribution of shared marine resources.

Peer-reviewed

Kenney, M. A., Kopp, R. E., Samaras, C., et al. (incl. Molina, R.), 2026. Research Priorities for Robust Climate Assessments in the United States. Earth’s Future, 14(9), e2025EF007336. [Co-published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society] Link

Villaseñor-Derbez, J. C., Buffort, A. W., & Molina, R., 2026. Competitiveness in American Seafood Requires Climate-Resilient Fisheries. Fish and Fisheries, 1–8. Link

Wintergalen, E. W., & Molina, R., 2025. The impact of proximity to urban areas on the dissolution of fishing cooperatives: Evidence from Mexico. Ocean & Coastal Management, 270, 107858. Link

Wintergalen, E. W., Fulton, S., & Molina, R., 2025. Trans-Sector Livelihood Resilience in an Urban Small-Scale Fishing Community. The Journal of Development Studies, 61(1), pp.1–20. Link

Dario, C., Molina, R., & Kelly, D. L., 2024. Public preferences for coastal adaptation: Economic evidence from a discrete choice experiment for hard structures and nature-based solutions in Miami, Florida. Marine Policy, 165, 106217. Link

Molina, R., Costello, C., & Kaffine, D., 2024. Sharing and expanding the co-benefits of conservation. Ecological Economics, 218, 108113. Link

Ovando, D., Liu, O., Molina, R., Parma, A., & Szuwalski, C., 2023. Global effects of marine protected areas on food security are unknown. Nature, 621(7979), pp.E34–E36. Link

Kelly, D., & Molina, R., 2023. Adaptation Infrastructure and its Effects in Property Values in the Face of Climate Impacts. Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 10(6), pp.1405–1438. [Lead Article] Link
Coverage: UM-Press JAERE

Pearson, H. C., Savoca, M. S., Costa, D. P., Lomas, M. W., Molina, R., Pershing, A. J., Smith, C. R., Villaseñor-Derbez, J. C., Wing, S. R., & Roman, J., 2023. Whales in the carbon cycle: Can recovery remove carbon dioxide? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 38(3), pp.238–249. Link
Coverage: Bloomberg CNN Washington Post Business Insider Fast Company

Wintergalen, E. W., Oyanedel, R., Villaseñor-Derbez, J. C., Fulton, S., & Molina, R., 2022. Opportunities and challenges for livelihood resilience in urban and rural Mexican small-scale fisheries. Ecology and Society, 27(3), 46. Link

Molina, R., 2022. The lack of property rights can make natural disasters worse: The case of small-scale fisheries in Chile. Ecological Economics, 200, 107540. Link

Liu, O. R., & Molina, R., 2021. The persistent transboundary problem in marine natural resource management. Frontiers in Marine Science, 8, 656023. Link

Molina, R., Letson, D., McNoldy, B., Mozumder, P., & Varkony, M., 2021. Striving for Improvement: The Perceived Value of Improving Hurricane Forecast Accuracy. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 102(7), pp.E1408–E1423. Link
Coverage: UM-Press

Ovando, D., Liu, O., Molina, R., & Szuwalski, C., 2021. Models of marine protected areas must explicitly address spatial dynamics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(23), e2025958118. Link

Costello, C., & Molina, R., 2021. Transboundary marine protected areas. Resource and Energy Economics, 65, 101239. Link
Coverage: UM-Press

Palacios-Abrantes, J., Herrera-Correal, J., Rodríguez, S., Brunkow, J., & Molina, R., 2018. Evaluating the bio-economic performance of a Callo de hacha (Atrina maura, Atrina tuberculosa & Pinna rugosa) fishery restoration plan in La Paz, Mexico. PLoS ONE, 13(12), e0209431. Link

Liu, O. R., Molina, R., Wilson, M., & Halpern, B. S., 2018. Global opportunities for mariculture development to promote human nutrition. PeerJ, 6, e4733. Link

Molina, R., Cerda, R., González, E., & Hurtado, F., 2012. Simulation model of the scallop (Argopecten purpuratus) farming in northern Chile: Some applications in the decision making process. Latin American Journal of Aquatic Research, 40(3), pp.679–693. Link

Book chapters

Norambuena, R., González, E., Molina, R., & Gomez, A., 2017. Impacts of Climate Change on Marine Fisheries and Aquaculture in Chile (Chapter 10 – Aquaculture). In: Phillips, B. & Pérez, M. (eds.), The Impacts of Climate Change on Fisheries and Aquaculture. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA. Link
Coverage: Aqua

González, E., Norambuena, R., Molina, R., & Thomas, F., 2013. Evaluación de potenciales impactos y reducción de la vulnerabilidad de la acuicultura al cambio climático en Chile [Potential Impacts and Reduction of the Aquaculture Vulnerability to Climate Change in Chile]. In: Cambio climático, pesca y acuicultura en América Latina: Potenciales impactos y desafíos para la adaptación. Taller FAO/Centro de Investigación Oceanográfica en el Pacífico Sur Oriental (COPAS), Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile. FAO Actas de Pesca y Acuicultura No. 29. Roma, FAO, pp.275–335. Link