Skip to main content

Jonathan Colmer.

Jonathan Colmer

Associate

Expertise: Environmental Economics, Development Economics, Public Economics, Labor Economics, International Trade.

Telephone:
001-434-924-3525
Email:
jmc4qg@virginia.edu
Links:
CEP Green Transition
CEP Growth
University of Virginia

Biography

Dr Jonathan Colmer is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia and Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance.

Publications

Journal article
Access to guns in the heat of the moment: more restrictive gun laws mitigate the effect of temperature on violence

Gun violence is a major problem in the United States, and extensive prior work has shown that higher temperatures increase violent behavior. We consider whether restricting the concealed carry of firearms mitigates or ex... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer and Jennifer L. Doleac

01 January 2026

CEP discussion papers
Nice work if you can get it? The distribution of employment and earnings during the early years of the clean energy transition

The transition to clean energy represents a fundamental and important shift in economic activity. We present new facts about workers in clean and legacy energy sectors between 2005 and 2019 using linked, administrative e... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Eva Lyubich and John Voorheis

09 October 2025

Blog
We need to predict the people disasters will hit, not just the places

Local authorities can deal with natural hazards more effectively if they know ahead of time who will be affected, writes Jonathan Colmer.... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer

24 June 2025

CEP discussion papers
The global effects of carbon border adjustment mechanisms

Climate change poses a collective action problem: individual countries bear the costs of carbon regulation, while the benefits are shared globally. Carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAMs), which are currently being i... Read more...

Kimberly Clausing, Jonathan Colmer, Allan Hsiao and Catherine Wolfram

02 May 2025

Blog
For US coal workers, earnings losses from the decline of their industry have been large and lasting

In the 2010s, coal mining employment in the US declined by over 50 percent. In new research, Jonathan Colmer and Eleanor Krause look at how costly this change has been for coal workers. The researchers find that these wo... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer and Eleanor Krause

28 April 2025

Blog
Income, wealth, and environmental inequality in the US

Economic disparities have long been suspected to be a root cause of environmental inequality. But is this really the case? This column links data on income and wealth with data on air pollution exposure over 40 years to ... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Suvy Qin, John Voorheis and Reed Walker

18 March 2025

Journal article
Do carbon offsets offset carbon?

We develop and implement a new method for identifying wasted subsidies and use it to provide systematic evidence of the misallocation of carbon offsets in the Clean Development Mechanism - the world's largest carbon offs... Read more...

Raphael Calel, Jonathan Colmer, Antoine Dechezlepretre and Matthieu Glachant

01 January 2025

CEP discussion papers
Income, wealth and environmental inequality in the United States

This paper explores the relationships between air pollution, income, and wealth by combining administrative data from U.S. tax returns between 1979-2016, various measures of air pollution, and sociodemographic informatio... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Suvy Qin, John Voorheis and Reed Walker

12 November 2024

CEP discussion papers
Transitional costs and the decline in coal: worker-level evidence

Workers' outside options play a central role in determining the transitional costs of labor demand shocks. Using comprehensive administrative data, we examine the worker-level effects of the decline of coal - a regionall... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Eleanor Krause, Eva Lyubich and John Voorheis

07 November 2024

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
in brief... Designing carbon markets that deliver change

Ever since the European Union created its market-based carbon policy, governments and businesses have been keen to assess its impact. Jonathan Colmer, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muuls and Ulrich Wagner explain why analysing ... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muuls and Ulrich J. Wagner

18 October 2024

Journal article
Does pricing carbon mitigate climate change? Firm-level evidence from the European Union Emissions Trading System

In theory, market-based regulatory instruments correct market failures at least cost. However, evidence on their efficacy remains scarce. Using administrative data, we estimate that, on average, the European Union Emissi... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muuls and Ulrich J. Wagner

24 May 2024

Journal article
The changing nature of pollution, income, and environmental inequality in the United States

This paper uses tax records linked to administrative Census data and high-resolution measures of air pollution exposure (PM2.5) to study the evolution of the Black-White pollution exposure gap since 1984. We decompose ch... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Suvy Qin, John Voorheis and Reed Walker

01 May 2024

CEP discussion papers
The changing nature of pollution, income and environmental inequality in the United States

This paper uses administrative tax records linked to Census demographic data and high-resolution measures of fine small particulate (PM2.5) exposure to study the evolution of the Black-White pollution exposure gap over t... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Suvy Qin, John Voorheis and Reed Walker

18 January 2024

CEP discussion papers
Is the electricity sector a weak link in development?

This paper asks whether increasing productivity in the electricity sector can yield larger long-run GDP gains than suggested by electricity's small share of aggregate economic activity. We answer this question using a dy... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, David Lagakos and Martin Shu

03 January 2024

CEP discussion papers
Access to guns in the heat of the moment: more restrictive gun laws mitigate the effect of temperature on violence

Gun violence is a major problem in the United States, and extensive prior work has shown that higher temperatures increase violent behavior. We consider whether restricting the concealed carry of firearms mitigates or ex... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer and Jennifer L. Doleac

13 July 2023

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
In brief... How citizens help expose environmental wrongdoing

Does enabling citizens to complain about public services provide an effective way of improving government services, or should we be concerned about the accuracy and reliability of such reports? Jonathan Colmer, Mary Evan... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Mary F. Evans and Jay Shimshack

20 June 2023

Blog
Citizen complaints can be a useful early warning system for governments to act on environmental violations.

Is enabling citizens to complain about public services an effective way of improving government services, or should we be more concerned about their accuracy and reliability? In new research, Jonathan Colmer, Mary Evans,... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Mary F. Evans and Jay Shimshack

18 April 2023

CEP discussion papers
Environmental citizen complaints

Citizen complaints feature prominently in public oversight contexts. The nature and effects of complaints, however, are controversial and poorly understood. Here, we exploit novel administrative data on over 130,000 envi... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Mary F. Evans and Jay Shimshack

09 March 2023

Journal article
Blame it on the rain: rainfall variability, consumption smoothing, and subjective well-being in rural Ethiopia

How does income uncertainty affect individual well-being? Combining individual-level panel data from rural Ethiopia with high-resolution meteorological data, we estimate that mean-preserving increases in rainfall variabi... Read more...

Yonas Alem and Jonathan Colmer

01 May 2022

CEP discussion papers
Do carbon offsets offset carbon?

We develop and implement a new method for identifying wasted subsidies and use it to provide systematic evidence of the misallocation of carbon offsets in the Clean Development Mechanism - the world's largest carbon offs... Read more...

Raphael Calel, Jonathan Colmer, Antoine Dechezlepretre and Matthieu Glachant

29 October 2021

Blog
How does climate change shape inequality, poverty and economic opportunity?

Climate change and economic inequality are often considered independently of one another. Jonathan Colmer explains how these factors are inextricably linked, and neither can be addressed without engaging with the other.... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer

05 October 2021

Journal article
Temperature, labor reallocation, and industrial production: evidence from India

To what degree can labor reallocation mitigate the economic consequences of weather-driven agricultural productivity shocks? I estimate that temperature-driven reductions in the demand for agricultural labor in India are... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer

01 October 2021

Journal article
Why are pollution damages lower in developed countries? Insights from high-Income, high-particulate matter Hong Kong

Conventional wisdom suggests that marginal damages from particulate matter pollution are high in less-developed countries because they are highly polluted. Using administrative data on the universe of births and deaths, ... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Dajun Lin, Siying Liu and Jay Shimshack

01 September 2021

Journal article
Rainfall variability, child labor, and human capital accumulation in rural Ethiopia

How does income uncertainty affect human capital investments in agrarian economies? Using child-level panel data, I exploit a medium-run change in mean-preserving rainfall variability to identify the effects of income un... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer

05 May 2021

CEP discussion papers
The grandkids aren't alright: the intergenerational effects of prenatal pollution exposure

Using newly linked survey and administrative data we provide early evidence that regulation- induced improvements in prenatal air quality have intergenerational effects on human capital accumulation in the United States.... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer and John Voorheis

02 December 2020

CEP discussion papers
Does pricing carbon mitigate climate change? Firm-level evidence from the European Union emissions trading scheme

In theory, market-based regulatory instruments correct market failures at least cost. However, evidence on their efficacy remains scarce. Using administrative data, we estimate that, on average, the EU ETS - the world's ... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muuls and Ulrich J. Wagner

17 November 2020

Journal article
What is the meaning of (statistical) life? Benefit-cost analysis in the time of Covid-19

Efforts to support public policy decisions need to be conducted carefully and thoughtfully. Recent efforts to estimate the social benefits of reductions in mortality risks associated with COVID-19 interventions are likel... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer

29 August 2020

Journal article
Disparities in PM2.5 air pollution in the United States

Air pollution at any given time is unequally distributed across locations. Average concentrations of fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5) have fallen over time. However, we do not know... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Ian Hardman, Jay Shimshack and John Voorheis

31 July 2020

CEP discussion papers
Why are pollution damages lower in developed countries? Insights from high income, high-particulate matter Hong Kong

Conventional wisdom suggests that marginal damages from particulate matter pollution are high in less-developed countries because they are highly polluted. Using administrative data on the universe of births and deaths, ... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Dajun Lin, Siying Liu and Jay Shimshack

03 July 2020

CEP discussion papers
Temperature, labor reallocation and industrial production: evidence from India

To what degree can labor reallocation mitigate the economic consequences of weather-driven agricultural productivity shocks? I estimate that temperature-driven reductions in the demand for agricultural labor in India are... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer

01 May 2018

CEP discussion papers
Consumption smoothing and the welfare cost of uncertainty

How does income uncertainty affect individual well-being? Combining individual-level panel data from rural Ethiopia with high-resolution meteorological data, we estimate that mean-preserving increases in rainfall variabi... Read more...

Yonas Alem and Jonathan Colmer

01 August 2015

CEP election analysis papers
#ElectionEconomics: The Research Evidence on Key Issues for Voters in the 2015 UK General Election

Please see the CEP #ElectionEconomics report(Paper 1)and the Executive Summary (Paper 2) that cover all the election 2015 briefings, discussing the research evidence on 15 of the UK's key policy battlegrounds: immigratio... Read more...

Ghazala Azmat, Brian Bell, Jonathan Colmer, Antoine Dechezlepretre, Swati Dhingra, Christian A. L. Hilber, Stephen Machin, Alan Manning, Ralf Martin, Alistair McGuire, Sandra McNally, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Henry G. Overman, Isabelle Roland, Thomas Sampson, Anna Valero, John Van Reenen, Jonathan Wadsworth, Gill Wyness and Gabriel Zucman

30 April 2015

CEP election analysis papers
Energy and the Environment: a cold climate for climate change policies?

The UK's main political parties have all pledged to combat climate change whatever the result of the general election. Yet according to a new report from the CEP, much of the discussion is largely rhetoric, with limited ... Read more...

Jonathan Colmer, Antoine Dechezlepretre and Ralf Martin

23 April 2015

spacer