CNN interviews UCLA Professor Lee Ohanian
UCLA Professor Lee Ohanian was interviewed by CNN on the question: What if California seceded from the United States? The interview can be found here.
Natalie Bau Wins Excellence Award
Natalie Bau received the Excellence Award in Global Economics Affairs from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
The Excellence Awards were created to promote young talent and are open to researchers and academics up to 35 years of age. Each laureate will be awarded a Research Fellowship at the Kiel Institute funded through separate scholarship programs. The aim of the Kiel Institute’s Excellence Awards in Global Economic Affairs is to build an international community of young economic researchers. The Excellence Awards have been presented annually since 2007.
UCLA Received Honorable Mention in the Fed Challenge
For the second year in row, UCLA received honorable mention at the Fed Challenge. This result puts UCLA in the top 6 schools out of 84 participants. The Fed Challenge is a nationwide competition among colleges and universities in which student-teams formulate a monetary policy recommendation and present it to judges from the Fed. The team was composed of Chris Surro (Faculty Advisor), Ali Haider Ismail (Grad Student Advisor), Jaden Locke, Anna Verghese, Sid Srikanth, Will Firmin, Arif Abd Aziz.
The press release from the Federal Reserve is available here.
Article by UCLA Professor Lee Ohanian featured in the WSJ and SF Chronicle
A recent Article by UCLA Professor Lee Ohanian discussing an acceleration in business flight from California was features in the Wall Street Journal and in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The article can found here.
UCLA Professor Bailey’s paper on COVID-19 and fertility receives broad media coverage
UCLA Professor Martha Bailey’s paper: “The COVID-19 Baby Bump: The Unexpected Increase in U.S. Fertility Rates in Response to the Pandemic,” joint with Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt, receives broad media coverage in the most important outlets. It is featured in the Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR’s Marketplace, CNN, Fortune, U.S. News and World Report, Time, Axios, and Marketwatch.
The paper, which studies the relationship between the pandemic and fertility rates can be found here.
UCLA Professor Martha Bailey receives the 2022 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award
UCLA Professor Martha Bailey is the recipient of the 2022 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award. The Carolyn Shaw Bell Award is given annually to an individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession, through example, achievements, increasing our understanding of how women can advance in the economics profession, or mentoring others.
The full announcement can be found here.
UCLA Professor and Clark Medal Winner Oleg Itskhoki Featured in UCLA Newsroom
UCLA Professor and Clark Medal Winner Oleg Itskhoki was recently featured in UCLA Newsroom.
You can read the entire article here.
NIH awards grant to Professor Lleras-Muney
The National Institute for Health has awarded UCLA Professor Lleras-Muney a grant for the project titled “The Health and Education Impacts of Long-Run Exposure to Pollution in Childhood: Evidence from the US Army.” The project will assess the causal effects of long-term pollution exposure on children’s health and educational attainment. It will focus on the children of military personnel, who represent an ideal group for this study because of rich administrative data that allows us to track the location and health status of children from birth to young adulthood. The results will contribute to a greater understanding of how the environment that children grow up in affects their long-term health and socioeconomic status, as well as provide guidance for regulatory policy on what constitutes safe levels of pollution exposure for this vulnerable subpopulation.
Professor Ohanian’s podcast on California homelessness
UCLA Professor Lee Ohanian discusses homelessness and housing problems in his podcast for California Sun.
The podcast can be found here.
The Long-Term Consequences of Slum Clearance on Children
By Fernanda Rojas Ampuero
Fernanda Rojas Ampuero
More than 25% of the world’s urban population today live in slums (UN-Habitat, 2020). A common policy response to high poverty and the large share of slum dwellers in developing countries has been to provide low-income housing in city peripheries and suburban areas. However, it is unclear whether these policies benefit recipients: Despite the improvement in housing quality, families lose in terms of proximity to jobs, social networks, and access to public goods, such as schools and health provision. There is little evidence on how moving to peripheral neighborhoods, rather than upgraded housing on site, affects the long-run outcomes of residents and their children.
In the paper titled “Sent Away: The Long-Term Effects of Slum Clearance on Children,” Fernanda Rojas Ampuero (former UCLA PhD student, current post-doc at Harvard) and Felipe Carrera (Reed College), study the long-term effects of moving to a high-poverty neighborhood on the earnings and schooling of children. To do so, they examine the impacts of a large-scale slum clearance and urban renewal program, the Program for Urban Marginality, that was implemented during the Chilean dictatorship between 1979 and 1985.
The program made all the slum dwellers become homeowners, but whereas some slums were upgraded into neighborhoods (non-displaced), other slum dwellers were forcedly relocated to suburban areas (displaced). The authors use this variation between types of intervention to estimate the effects of the forced displacement on children’s outcomes. To empirically estimate the effects, they combine archival records and administrative data.
The authors find negative effects for children aged 0 to 18: Compared with the non-displaced, displaced children earned on average 10% less per month over their life. This negative effect is not associated with lower employment but with the quality of employment: Displaced children were more likely to work in temporary jobs and without a formal contract. In addition, displacement reduced children’s educational attainment: A displaced child lost 0.5 years of education and was 12% less likely to graduate from high school relative to a non-displaced child.
What explains these results? Almost 70% of the variation on children’s adult labor earnings can be explain by the characteristics of the municipalities of destination. The authors find evidence that lower social cohesion, measured as neighborhood fragmentation, reduced children’s schooling. In addition, their adult labor earnings were also affected by worse labor market access, measured as access to public transportation at the time of the intervention.
This paper contributes to the literature on neighborhood effects, with the novelty that it is the first to look at a developing country and long-term outcomes. Although families received a new housing unit, the results of this paper document that forcing families to live in peripheral and low-quality neighborhoods has long-term negative consequences, and it sheds light on which aspects of neighborhoods matter.
