海角大神

If public universities cap salaries for their Presidents, will they recruit less able leaders? The California State Universities may soon be running this experiment. 聽 聽 The Chronicle also has an interesting article on my UCLA colleague Dick Jackson. 聽Dr. Jackson is a leading scholar at UCLA's School of Public Health. 聽Here is a quote from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Can better urban design make us healthier?

This raises a fundamental selection versus treatment question. 聽Put bluntly, do people with a proclivity to be sick self select to live in nasty neighborhoods featuring bad air quality, little access to good public transit and shopping opportunities? 聽Or do, people who for random reasons choose to live in those areas subsequently become sick? 聽The first is a selection effect while the second is a treatment effect.

Consider the example of smoking; 聽if we observe that smokers tend to suffer from sickness --- again is this selection or treatment or both? 聽Do the most impatient people in society smoke and such individuals tend to under invest in their health and subsequently are more likely to become sick or does smoking have an independent treatment effect on making you sicker? 聽The answer is that both effects are likely to be playing out.

I find that public health researchers tend to ignore fundamental issues of self selection on unobserved attributes (one of Jim Heckman's early homeruns) and implicitly assume that households are randomly assigned across space so that any observed differences in outcomes are due to "treatment effects". 聽 In the absence of randomized trials (where residential locational choice is determined at random), this is a hard topic to work on.

Matthew Turner and co-authors have written an under-appreciated paper that was published in the Journal of Urban Economics. 聽 Here is the abstract of their paper titled "Fat City":
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Intuitively, Turner estimates a fixed effects regression using panel data where he tracks the same person over time for people who move from the center city to the suburbs or vice versa. If sprawl makes us fat, then the average person who moves from the center to the suburbs should be gaining more weight over time than the people who never leave the center city or never leave the suburbs. Turner rejects this hypothesis.

So, there is plenty of work to be done here but it remains an open question of how urban form affects our behavior. I've been especially interested in this question focused on our carbon footprint as a function of urban form.