Abstract: Transmission congestion represents a critical bottleneck for the efficient deployment of renewable energy necessary to meet rising electricity demand and decarbonization targets. This paper provides the first causal quantification of how constraints within an electricity market region alter the scale and spatial allocation of energy investments. Crucially, congestion modifies incentives, creating downside risk that deters renewables while generating profitable rents that sustain otherwise uneconomic fossil fuel projects. I estimate a developer entry and location choice model to distinguish how congestion drives both early site screening and later project attrition. Empirical results using data from Texas confirm that high congestion losses strongly discourage applications and push renewables from optimal resource-rich sites. Counterfactual simulations illustrate substantial welfare gains: relieving the ten most constrained lines boosts planned renewable output by 1.6 million MWh and corrects spatial misallocation, with 8% of the increase coming from projects moving to more productive sites. Simultaneously, the targeted congestion relief deters over 1,500 MW of planned fossil fuel investment, avoiding an estimated $608 million annually in CO₂ damages. These findings demonstrate that current U.S. regulatory practice, which omits the value of generation investment effects in transmission cost-benefit analysis, significantly undervalues strategic transmission planning, risking suboptimal infrastructure deployment.

Abstract: The Northern Hemisphere summer jet stream creates circumglobal patterns of extreme heat and rainfall when it gets stuck in a high-amplitude configuration. We show that high-amplitude jet stream configurations affect the value of trade conducted around the world. Changing the summer jet stream's maximum amplitude from the bottom tercile to the top tercile increases growth in trade value by 3.0 [0.63--5.4] percentage points when the jet stream has a five-wave configuration and reduces growth in trade value by 4.0 [1.7-6.4] percentage points when the jet stream has an eight-wave configuration. These circumglobal weather patterns affect exports of many different types and their effects are large relative to better-known El Niño teleconnections. A country's trade responds to how the jet stream controls weather in other countries, not through how it controls a country's own weather. Improved forecasting of global-scale weather patterns could aid firms and policymakers in forecasting global economic activity.