We launched the Opportunity Lab website. The Opportunity Lab is a new group of economists on campus that leverage data to uncover solutions to poverty and inequality issues. The Lab focuses on six core research areas: Climate and Environment, Crime and Criminal Justice, Education and Child Development, Health, Social Safety Nets and Employment, Taxation and Inequality. Sol and collaborator Reed Walker are co-directing the Climate and Environment program of the Lab. Stay tuned!
Hsiang at MIT's EmTech /
Solomon Hsiang will be speaking at MIT's EmTech 2016 conference October 19th, hosted but the Technology Review. More info and registration here.
Paper: Attendance distorts standardized test scores /
Felipe Gonzalez has a new working paper Distorted Quality Signals in School Markets, demonstrating that schools in Chile increase their ranking by discouraging low performing students from showing up to class on days when standardized tests are administered. This is important because standardized tests scores determine how competitive schools are ranked and how resources are allocated across schools.
How far has policy research come in 3000 years? /
At the Asian Art Museum of SF, a display of oracle bones provides perspective on how far we've come in terms of using science to improve policy decisions. These bones (circa 1100 BCE) were designed to discover information about potential future outcomes by eliciting answers from deceased ancestors.
The center bone aims to determine whether war with a neighboring group is wise.
Kadish awarded land use grant /
This is not Jonathan Kadish
Jonathan Kadish was awarded a grant to study land use and transportation technologies by the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics.
NYT Editorial Board cites GPL research on ivory regulation /
The New York Times Editorial Board cited recent GPL research on the effect of ivory legalization on elephant poaching as a basis for their opinion on proposed future sales.
Credit: Ben Curtis/Associated Press
Paper: Effects of legalization on black markets /
Solomon Hsiang and Nitin Sekar have a new NBER Working Paper Does legalization reduce black market activity? Evidence from a global ivory experiment and elephant poaching data.
Publication: Potentially extreme migration and population concentration in the tropics /
Adam Sobel and Sol Hsiang have a new paper Potentially Extreme Population Displacement and Concentration in the Tropics Under Non-Extreme Warming in Scientific Reports.
Sol describes the paper on the G-FEED blog here.
Kadish awarded urban economics grant /
Jonathan Kadish was awarded a 1 year grant by the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics to study energy use in cities!
CBO cites two GPL publications in national hurricane report /
The Congressional Budget Office used calculations in Hsiang & Jina (2014) and The American Climate Prospectus to inform their recent report on Potential Increases in Hurricane Damage in the United States: Implications for the Federal Budget. See a summary of the report by Politico here.
Hurricane Katrina
DS421 summer interns join lab /
The Lab is excited to welcome three summer interns from the DS421 program: Valerie Vasquez, Matt Kling, and Ian Bolliger!
Video: Empirical climate damages at the National Academy of Science /
Michael Greenstone recently presented new results from the Climate Impact Lab at the National Academy of Sciences. This work (and the talk) follow logically from Sol's talk to the same NAS group back in November. The work Michael presented represented a major team effort that included [amazing] contributions by Tamma Carleton, James Rising, and Megan Landin here at GPL.
Climate Impact Lab web launch /
We launched the Climate Impact Lab website. The Impact Lab is a collaboration with team members at University of Chicago, Rutgers, and Rhodium Group to construct an empirically founded basis for the global social cost of carbon.
This collaboration produced the American Climate Prospectus in 2014.
see more here
Publication: Climate Econometrics /
Sol has a new review article out on Climate Econometrics, the new collection of techniques used to measure the effects of climate on societies and economies. The paper is forthcoming in the Annual Reviews of Resource Economics.
Sol summarized the paper in a blog post at G-FEED.
Carleton awarded EPA STAR Fellowship /
Tamma Carleton was awarded a 3-year Science To Achieve Results (STAR) graduate fellowship by the EPA to support her doctoral dissertation research!