Nicholas Irwin (Economics), Shawn McCoy (Economics/Lied Center for Real Estate), and co-author Katie Jo Black (Kenyon College) recently published an article, "Wildfire risk, salience, and housing development in the wildland–urban interface," in the Journal of Regional Science, the pre-eminent journal in regional and urban economics and an A-level journal on the Lee Business School journal list. In the article, the authors study the saliency effect of wildfires on new residential development in Colorado, finding wildfires provide a temporary reduction in the rate of new construction for up to five years but not at a level sufficient to generate meaningful reduction of residential growth in wildfire prone regions.
