Economics Commons^™

Southern Nevada Regional Industrial Study, Brookings Mountain West, Center For Business And Economic Research, Transportation Research Center

Policy Briefs and Reports

Recognizing the ongoing need to diversify the Southern Nevada economy, in 2023 GOED commissioned Brookings Mountain West, the UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research, and the UNLV Transportation Research Center to evaluate how Southern Nevada can leverage its geography and connectivity to neighboring states and metros at the megapolitan level to pursue industrial opportunities in the face of shifting global supply chains, diminishing developable land, the need for efficient management of the regional water supply, and the availability of unprecedented federal resources to support clean energy development, manufacturing, electrification of transportation systems, and supply-chain resiliency.

The study builds on …

Broadband Equity, Access, And Deployment In Nevada, Brad Wimmer

Policy Briefs and Reports

The $45.45 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program’s primary objective is to extend broadband service to all unserved and underserved locations in the U.S. and its territories. Several industry studies predict that the BEAD program can meet its goal of providing universal access to broadband service if eligible entities execute their grant programs well. My review of the BEAD program indicates that policy makers can enhance the likelihood of program success by designing competitive grant programs that give applicants the incentive to undercut the subsidies proposed by their rivals and provide applicants the flexibility to design networks that …

Governing Smart Cities As Knowledge Commons - Introduction, Chapter 1 & Conclusion, Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, Madelyn Sanfilippo

Book Chapters

Smart city technology has its value and its place; it isn’t automatically or universally harmful. Urban challenges and opportunities addressed via smart technology demand systematic study, examining general patterns and local variations as smart city practices unfold around the world. Smart cities are complex blends of community governance institutions, social dilemmas that cities face, and dynamic relationships among information and data, technology, and human lives. Some of those blends are more typical and common. Some are more nuanced in specific contexts. This volume uses the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework to sort out relevant and important distinctions. The framework grounds …

The Evolution Of The Southern Nevada Healthcare Economy: Building The Unlv Academic Health Center, The Lincy Institute

Lincy Institute Events

With the successful launch of the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV and the completion of its medical education building, Southern Nevada is positioned to expand its healthcare infrastructure - and its healthcare economy - to create a comprehensive, integrated healthcare system to serve our fast-growing community. As UNLV moves forward with the development of an integrated academic health center within the Las Vegas Medical District, understanding the economic and social benefits of such a transformational project is important to stakeholders throughout the region.

The Lincy Institute hosted representatives of Tripp Umbach - the nation's leading consultant on community …

The Case For Dynamic Cities, Brian J. Asquith, Margaret C. Bock

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Cities today are confronting never-before-seen challenges to their top spot in the economic hierarchy. In this chapter, we lay out four challenges, past and future, that cities face today and identify policies that can help address the problems we identify. We call attention to the need for many U.S. cities to redevelop the large amount of aging postwar single-family housing, while reforming past exclusionary zoning and infrastructure decisions that exacerbated inequality. Cities will have to fix these past mistakes against the backdrop of an aging population and the rise of remote working, both of which undercut cities’ traditional source of …

Infrastructure Development And Gentrification: A Case Study Of The 2017 Q Line Extension In New York City, Harrison Shoaf

Honors College Theses

An examination of the 2017 Q Line subway extension in New York City and the potential causal relationship between its implementation and rental rates and gentrification in the surrounding area. Analysis of data covering the timeframe from 2007 to 2019 allows for utilization of OLS regression to determine if the area subject to the implementation experienced a change in rental rates and instigation of gentrification afterward compared to areas that were not subject to the implementation. Results indicate a decrease in rental rates (and by extent, no instigation of gentrification) in the area subject to the extension after it was …

Kentucky Annual Economic Report 2022, Michael W. Clark, James P. Ziliak, Simon Sheather

Kentucky Annual Economic Report

This report is one of the important ways that the Center for Business and Economic Research fulfills its mission to examine various aspects of Kentucky’s economy as directed by the Kentucky Revised Statutes (KRS 164.738). The analysis and data presented here cover a variety of topics that range from a discussion of Kentucky’s current economic climate to a broad presentation of factors affecting the economy.

The report covers numerous dimensions of Kentucky’s economy including the effects of COVID-19. As the pandemic approaches its third year, COVID-19 continues to dominate the economic narrative. Many aspects of the economy have improved substantially …

The Kind Of Solution A Smart City Is: Knowledge Commons And Postindustrial Pittsburgh, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

This case study brings new attention to a critical but under-appreciated dimension of so-called “smart” cities: how smart city governance builds and relies on institutionalized sharing of data, information, and other forms of knowledge across all sectors of public administration. Those smart city practices are referred to here as knowledge commons and systematized using the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) research framework. That framework extends and modifies Ostrom’s research tradition as to community-based resource governance. As with other GKC-focused research, this work relies on a qualitative case study. It draws a detailed, context-specific portrait of a smart city as knowledge commons …

Traffic Scorecard In Mountain West Cities, Kelliann Beavers, Eshaan Vakil, Katie M. Gilbertson, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Transportation & Infrastructure

This fact sheet presents congestion and mobility trends in 14 Mountain West cities as compiled by INRIX Research and author Trevor Reed, in the Global Traffic Scorecard, March 2020. The INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard examines the impact of vehicle travel on 975 congested cities in the world; this fact sheet focuses on the Mountain West, providing insight on the ranking and impacts of congestion. This fact sheet also supplements INRIX’s scorecard with population data from the U.S. Census Bureau to provide context for the rankings.

Traffic-Related Pedestrian Deaths In The Sun Belt Region, Madison Frazee-Bench, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Transportation & Infrastructure

This Fact Sheet presents data from Smart Growth America on the number of pedestrian fatalities in U.S. states and congressional districts. For the purpose of this fact sheet, the data included focus on the Sun Belt region between 2008 and 2017, highlighting areas with the highest rates of traffic-related pedestrian deaths.

Transportation Affordability In The Mountain West, Saha Salahi, Kelliann Beavers, Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Transportation & Infrastructure

This Fact Sheet highlights “The Most and Least Affordable Cities For Public Transit” in the Mountain West. Extracting from Paul Reynolds’ analysis of over 70 transit system across the United States from 2014 to 2015, this fact sheet focuses on data for the 7 municipalities in the Mountain West: Albuquerque, NM; Ogden, UT; Boulder, CO; Phoenix, AZ; Las Vegas, NV, Salt Lake City, UT, and Denver, CO.

Disamenity Or A Signal Of Competence? The Empirical Political Economy Of Local Road Maintenance, Benjamin Blemings, Margaret Bock

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Empirical results find different conclusions than theoretical evidence of how electorates perceive road work. This paper uses a geographically smaller unit of analysis than prior work, political alignment, local election cycles, and difference-in-differences. It finds political distortions in invasive road maintenance timing and rules out maintenance seasonality. Spatial discontinuity plots leveraging ward boundary cutoffs confirm the shift. Results identify new public distortions to road maintenance, local election cycles, which are widespread and frequent. The estimates are used to calculate financial costs of local elections on road maintenance. Local elections have cost medium-large U.S. cities over $185.5 million from 1960- 2020.

The Urban Heat Island Effect In Nevada, Ember Smith, Kaylie Pattni, Caitlin Saladino, William E. Brown

Environment

This fact sheet explores the temperature difference between Nevada cities and their undeveloped surrounding areas using reports by the Urban Land Institute, Climate Central, National Public Radio (NPR), and various governmental organizations. We investigate what “urban heat islands” are, their effects, the correlation between heat and income, and factors that contribute to rising temperatures in Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, and Reno.

Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy

Research Collection School Of Economics

We use contemporaneous and retrospective panel datasets to examine the household-level relationship between fertility and access to electricity in Bangladesh. We find that access to electricity reduces fertility by about 0.2 children over a period of five years or total fertility rate by about 1.2 in most estimates. This finding is robust with respect to the choice of the estimation method, the choice of sample, and potential presence of endogeneity. The finding also corroborates the theoretical predictions on time use and consumption pattern derived from our model of electrification and fertility. The results also suggest that television is an important …

U.S. Infrastructure: 1929-2017, Ray C. Fair

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper examines the history of U.S. infrastructure since 1929 and in the process reports an interesting fact about the U.S. economy. Infrastructure as a percent of GDP began a steady decline around 1970, and the government budget deficit became positive and large at roughly the same time. The infrastructure pattern in other countries does not mirror that in the United States, so the United States appears to be a special case. The overall results suggest that the United States became less future oriented beginning around 1970. This change has persisted. This is the interesting fact. Whether it can be …

The Economic Impact Of Failing Infrastructure In The New York Metropolitan Area, Nicholas Travis

Honors College Theses

Infrastructure in the New York Metropolitan Area has been seriously underfunded due to a failure of public investment on the local, state and federal level. Prior research has presented concrete reasoning that the now crumbling infrastructure will seriously affect economic growth and worker productivity. This research seeks to quantify the economic effects as a result of this failing infrastructure. My research asks: what are the concrete, additional economic expenditures, due to failing infrastructure, that drivers spend each year? How much do these economic costs decrease our economic productivity, and how do the economic costs compare with proposed infrastructure improvements? From …

Tallahassee Central City Planning Study, Tallahassee-Leon County Planning Department

City and Regional Planning -- Florida

Study on Developing Downtown Tallahassee

Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy

Research Collection School Of Economics

We use a household-level panel dataset from Bangladesh to examine the household-level relationship between fertility and the access to electricity. We find that the household's access to electricity reduces the change in the number of children by about 0.1 to 0.25 children in a period of five years in most estimates. This finding also applies to retrospective panel data and is robust to the choice of covariates and estimation methods. Our finding passes falsification test and corroborates with the predictions of our theoretical model on the households' time use and consumption pattern.

Valuing Public Goods More Generally: The Case Of Infrastructure, David Albouy, Arash Farahani

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We examine the relationship between local public goods, prices, wages, and population in an equilibrium inter-city model. Non-traded production, federal taxes, and imperfect mobility all affect how public goods (or “amenities” more broadly) should be valued from data. Reinterpreting the estimated effects of public infrastructure on prices and wages in Haughwout (2002), we find infrastructure over twice as valuable with our more general model. New estimates based on more years, cities, and data-sets indicate stronger wage and positive population effects of infrastructure. These imply higher values of infrastructure to firms, and also to households if moving costs are substantial.

Consequences Of The Clean Water Act And The Demand For Water Quality, David A. Keiser, Joseph S. Shapiro

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Since the 1972 U.S. Clean Water Act, government and industry have invested over $1 trillion to abate water pollution, or $100 per person-year. Over half of U.S. stream and river miles, however, still violate pollution standards. We use the most comprehensive set of files ever compiled on water pollution and its determinants, including 50 million pollution readings from 170,000 monitoring sites, to study water pollution’s trends, causes, and welfare consequences. We have three main findings. First, water pollution concentrations have fallen substantially since 1972, though were declining at faster rates before then. Second, the Clean Water Act’s grants to municipal …

Consequences Of The Clean Water Act And The Demand For Water Quality, David A. Keiser, Joseph S. Shapiro

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Since the 1972 U.S. Clean Water Act, government and industry have invested over $1 trillion to abate water pollution, or $100 per person-year. Over half of U.S. stream and river miles, however, still violate pollution standards. We use the most comprehensive set of files ever compiled on water pollution and its determinants, including 50 million pollution readings from 240,000 monitoring sites and a network model of all U.S. rivers, to study water pollution’s trends, causes, and welfare consequences. We have three main findings. First, water pollution concentrations have fallen substantially. Between 1972 and 2001, for example, the share of waters …

Increasing Access To Potable Water: A Question Of Economics And Governance In Bo District, Sierra Leone, Alissa M. Heiring

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This paper analyzes existing supply gaps that are impeding rural water access in Bo District, Sierra Leone. On a national and district level, Sierra Leone has failed to meet the target of 70% access to potable water inspired by the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals. This paper focuses on Bo District due to its near total inclusion in the Sewa River basin and split urban and rural population. Given the existing political and economic constraints, this paper identifies the most feasible way to sustainably increase access to potable water in Bo. To develop the recommendations, current supply gaps in rural …

Poverty Decomposition By Regression: An Application To Tanzania, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop a poverty decomposition method that is based on a consumption regression model. Because this method uses an integral of the partial derivatives of a poverty measure with respect to time, the resulting poverty decomposition satisfies time-reversion consistency and sub-period additivity. Unlike the existing poverty decomposition methods, it allows us to ascribe the observed change in poverty to various covariates of interest collected at a disaggregate level. This method is applied to two datasets from Tanzania to assess, among others, the short- and long-term impacts of infrastructure and market access on poverty.

Low-Cost, Transportable Hydrogen Fueling Station For Early Fcev Adoption, Ian A. Richardson, Jacob T. Fisher, Jacob W. Leachman, Patrick E. Frome, Ben O. Smith, Shaotong Guo, Sayonsom Chanda, Mikko S. Mcfeely, Austin M. Miller

Economics Faculty Publications

Thousands of public hydrogen fueling stations are needed to support the early Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle (FCEV) market in the U.S.; there are currently 12. The California state government has been the largest investor of the hydrogen fueling infrastructure funding 9 permanent stations currently open to the public with 48 more in development costing anywhere from $1.8M-$5.5M each. To attract private investors and decrease dependence on government funding, a low-cost, mobile hydrogen dispensing system must be developed. This paper describes a transportable hydrogen fueling station that has been designed for $423,000 using off-the-shelf components, less than 23% of the capital …

Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy

Research Collection School Of Economics

We use a panel dataset from Bangladesh to examine the relationship between fertility and the adoption of electricity with the latter instrumented by infrastructure development and the quality of service delivery. We find that the adoption of electricity reduces fertility, and this impact is more pronounced when the household already has two or more children. This observation can be explained by a simple household model of time use, in which adoption of electricity affects only the optimal number of children but not necessarily current fertility behavior if the optimal number has not yet been reached.

Producing Population Health: Collective Action Requires Infrastructure, Incentives & Evidence, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Population health improvement strategies are collective action problems that require targeted infrastructure, incentives, and information to succeed. Research on collective action problems and solutions in public health and other spheres of practice offer insight for the successful scale and spread of population health innovations.

Unifying Systems For Population Health: Infrastructure, Incentives & Evidence For Collective Action, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

This presentation, part of the SBM Presidential Symposium on Aligning Family, Clinical, and Community Systems, reviews the collective action problems that are commonly encountered in implementing multi-sector population health improvement strategies, and examines research on ways of using public health strategies and infrastructure to overcome these problems.

Is There A Role For Common Carriage In An Internet-Based World?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

During the course of the network neutrality debate, advocates have proposed extending common carriage regulation to broadband Internet access services. Others have endorsed extending common carriage to a wide range of other Internet-based services, including search engines, cloud computing, Apple devices, online maps, and social networks. All too often, however, those who focus exclusively on the Internet era pay too little attention to the lessons of the legacy of regulated industries, which has long struggled to develop a coherent rationale for determining which industries should be subject to common carriage. Of the four rationales for determining the scope of common …

Frameworks For Systemic And Structural Analysis Of Financial Innovations In Infrastructure, Ali Mostafavi, Dulcy M. Abraham

Infrastructure System-of-Systems (I-SoS ) Research Group

Financial innovations have emerged globally to close the gap between the rising global demand for infrastructures and the availability of financing sources offered by traditional financing mechanisms such as fuel taxation, tax-exempt bonds, and federal and state funds. The key to sustainable innovative financing mechanisms is effective policymaking. This paper discusses the theoretical framework of a research study whose objective is to structurally and systemically assess financial innovations in global infrastructures. The research aims to create analysis frameworks, taxonomies and constructs, and simulation models pertaining to the dynamics of the innovation process to be used in policy analysis. Structural assessment …

Understanding The Contribution Of Highway Investment To National Economic Growth: Comments On Mamuneas’S Study, Randall W. Eberts

Reports

This paper reviews and summarizes current literature by Theofanis P. Mamuneas (2008) and Mamuneas with M. Ishaq Nadiri (2003) on the returns to highway investments. This paper first provides an overview of the conceptual relationship between highways and output. The next section describes the highway capital stock estimated by Fraumeni and used by Mamuneas. Next, the paper describes the study conducted by Mamuneas and analyzes the results for consistency within the modeling framework and in context with other studies. The paper then briefly summarizes the broad range of estimates from the literature to offer additional context. Finally, the paper offers …