Economics

This project funds research that will evaluate how firms and consumers respond to market-based policies that are supposed to improve air quality and address environmental issues. The focus here is on testing hypotheses drawn from economic theory about how new environmental policies affect business and public health in the rapidly growing Chinese economy. China is about to adopt a new national program of cap-and-trade emissions policies. The research team will collect innovative measures of pollution, firm outcomes, and individual health.

This project studies structural changes in high dimensional factor models. Structural changes can be the consequence of technical progress, changes in preference, or policy regime shifts. Structural changes imply unstable relationships among economic variables. What underlines factor models is that a few common shocks can explain the co-movement of a large number of economic variables, so that information in a high dimensional data set can be summarized by a small number of common factors.

This project investigates how the provision of urban transportation infrastructure affect growth within cities and property values. Quantifying the effect of transportation projects on city growth and property values has proven difficult for at least two reasons. First, transportation infrastructure may produce growth and a rise in property values, but the latter may also lead to transportation projects.