Economics

Exploring selfish incentives for pursuing climate policy

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 01:02:56 +0000

Exploring selfish incentives for pursuing climate policy Rachel Sauer Mon, 01/13/2025 - 18:02

Bradley Worrell

CU ��«��Ƶ economist Alessandro Peri makes the case that empowering the young can meaningfully affect climate policy and climate outcomes

The consensus opinion in previous research—that future generations are the major beneficiaries of proactive climate policies—tends to emphasize the importance of intergenerational altruism. However, that perspective largely ignores the idea that selfish incentives of current young and old generations can be an important driver to undertake climate policy, says Alessandro Peri, assistant professor in the ��«��Ƶ Department of Economics.

Recent studies indicate that peak global warming occurs within a decade of emissions. Thus, current climate policy could benefit young generations later in their lifetimes, says Peri, a macroeconomist whose research focus includes computational and environmental economics.

CU ��«��Ƶ economist Alessandro Peri argues that selfish incentives of current young and old generations can be an important driver to undertake climate policy.

Meanwhile, climate policy may benefit the current old generations by reducing the damages associated with climate change and therefore increasing the value of their assets.

In the paper, “Selfish Incentives for Climate Policy: Empower the Young!” recently published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, Peri and his two co-authors advanced what they say is the first study to examine the direction and magnitude of the selfish incentives of young and old to undertake climate policy.

In the economic model Peri and his co-authors developed, the younger generation (ranging from infants to those aged 35) and the older generation are both part of solutions addressing the climate crisis. The older generation tends to control most of the world’s physical assets, such as factories, he notes.

“What we found after we analyzed, theoretically and quantitively, this question of selfish incentives for climate policy is that incentives of the younger generation can be an important driver for climate policy to address the challenge of global warming,” says Peri.

Abatement measures related to reduced carbon emissions can affect the asset owners’ wealth and, accordingly, the old generation’s selfish incentives to support or oppose climate policy, but the effect is quantitatively small. Hence, Peri says, the exhortation in the title: “Empower the Young!”

When climate policy is a win-win

To explore the selfish incentives for climate policy, the model Peri and his co-authors developed uses a two-generation overlapping generations model, rather than the more common infinitely lived agent model. Peri says the two-generation structure permits a clear distinction between the two types of self-interest: the younger generation’s concern for its future consumption and the older generation’s desire to protect its wealth.

For the incentives of the current young and old generations to undertake climate policy to be aligned (a win-win situation), climate policy must increase the value of the assets owned by the old generations.

“Think about it like if you own a house in front of a lake,” Peri explains. “You don't really like the lake, but someone else decides to clean the lake. Well, the value of your house close to the lake is going to increase; you’re going to benefit indirectly from the cleaning of the environment on your wealth. The (increase) of this price allows the older generations to engage in climate policy and be happy about climate policy.”

For this to happen, Peri and his co-authors created an economic model that uses endogenous asset prices, relaxing the assumption of fixed asset price adopted by most models in the climate literature.

As wealth is transferred from the older generation to the younger one, for the asset price to increase it has to be the case that current young generations want to save more.

“With the new evidence that has shown that emissions today will have an impact in our lifetime in terms of global warming, we wanted to add our new part … looking at how selfish incentives can help mitigate this great human challenge," says CU ��«��Ƶ researcher Alessandro Peri.

“They (the young) are willing to consume a little bit less today and save for tomorrow, so that they can consume more tomorrow,” as a result of climate policy, Peri says. “And what we show is that for that to happen, it means the young have to have a high elasticity of intertemporal substitution, which is just a fancy way of saying that they are willing to transfer more consumption from today to tomorrow” as a result of the effect of climate policy on the value of consumption over time.

Still, based upon the results of computational research done for the research paper, Peri says he and his co-authors determined that selfish incentives for the younger generation proved more quantitatively important for climate policy than those of the old generation.

Goal to spur further research and discussions

Peri says he hopes the economic model for addressing climate change that he and his co-authors created will complement existing research on economic policy related to climate change, including those that rely on altruistic motivations. He says he does not expect lawmakers to adopt the model as policy, but he hopes the paper will spur further research by economists and prompt discussions among policymakers.

Discussions about combatting climate change are particularly timely now, Peri says, given that in 2024 the temperature of the earth reached 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than in the pre-industrial era—before heat-trapping fossil fuels began accumulating in the atmosphere. The Paris Climate Accords, signed by representatives for numerous countries in 2016, aims to keep warming below that level when looking over multiple years.

“This is the great challenge we are facing nowadays, with the announcement in 2024 that we reached 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. So, it’s been the hottest year that we’ve observed since the pre-industrial era,” Peri says. “With the new evidence that has shown that emissions today will have an impact in our lifetime in terms of global warming, we wanted to add our new part … looking at how selfish incentives can help mitigate this great human challenge.”

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CU ��«��Ƶ economist Alessandro Peri makes the case that empowering the young can meaningfully affect climate policy and climate outcomes.

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He will, he will rock you

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 13:11:59 +0000

He will, he will rock you Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/10/2024 - 07:11

Rachel Sauer

Pursuing a passion for music, CU ��«��Ƶ economist Murat Iyigun transforms from recognized expert on economics of the family and economic history to regional rock star with a growing musical reputation

In a low-key pub and grill on a quiet street in Littleton, Colorado, it’s about 10 minutes to 8 on a Saturday night, and the renowned economist seems to be in six places at once.

He’s sound checking his guitar and finalizing plans with the light technician and joking with the singers and ticking through the set list with the drummer and donning a dusky green bomber jacket and wraparound shades.

The dance floor in front of the stage is empty for now, but it won’t be for long. At a little after 8, members of the steadily growing audience put down their forks and drinks to welcome—as they’d been invited, as the musicians had been introduced—the Custom Shop Band.

Murat Iyigun is a professor of economics focusing on the economics of the family and economic history.

A kaleidoscope of colored lights flashes from the rafters toward the stage as lead singers Amy Gray, Mckenna Lee and Abbey Kochevar begin an iconic refrain: stomp-stomp-clap, stomp-stomp-clap.

“Buddy you're a boy, make a big noise, playin' in the street, gonna be a big man someday,” Gray sings, achieving the stratospheric, Mercurian growl and grandeur of the original. “You got mud on your face, you big disgrace, kickin' your can all over the place. Singin'…”

The renowned economist leans toward his mic and joins the immortal chorus: “We will, we will rock you.”

It wasn’t so much a threat as a promise. For the next four hours, minus breaks between sets, the band founded by Murat Iyigun, a ��«��Ƶ professor of economics and former economist with the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., would rock everyone there.

And they would rock hard.

‘You should listen to Queen’

The question, then, is how does a scholar and economist widely known for his research on the economics of the family and economic history come to be on a pub-and-grill stage on a Saturday night, slaying licks originally conceived by Brian May?

“Life is funny, isn’t it?” Iyigun admits.

The story starts, as not many rock stories do, in Ankara, Turkey. The son of a Turkish father and a Turkish-American mother, Iyigun grew up during a tumultuous time in Turkey, when older kids might stop him on the street to ask whether he was a leftist or a rightist. Still, he says, he was lucky and maybe even a little sheltered, while some of his older sisters’ friends became victims of the left/right violence.

It was that violence, in fact, that caused his older sister’s university to be shut down for seven months. To continue her chemistry studies, she transferred to The Ohio State University, but not before leaving her LP collection to her younger brother.

“I was about 13, and I was counting the days to when she left in July because I was going to be getting all the LPs,” Iyigun recalls with a laugh. “‘Hotel California’ was huge that summer, and then there was Cat Stevens, ELO. I was totally captivated even though, compared to now, things were so closed for us. Going to the U.S. was like going to Mars. But in terms of music and Western culture, especially among urban secular Turks, we followed everything.

Murat Iyigun was inspired to learn to play the guitar after hearing Queen's album Live Killers. (Photos: The Custom Shop Band)

“Now you can get all the vinyls and they’re easy to come by, but at that time people basically made tapes that everyone shared around. There was all this bootleg stuff that would come from Europe, and someone in Istanbul would press some vinyls, but I was never sure if they had an agreement (with the record labels) or if those were counterfeit.”

At the tender age of 13, Iyigun was more into the mellow side of rock n’ roll. A few years deeper into his teens, however, and he discovered KISS. Visiting family in the United States during the summer of ’78—a time that might be considered the fever-pitch apex of the band’s makeup years—Iyigun acquired all things KISS: T-shirts, posters, tapes, you name it.

It might have been the following summer, he doesn’t remember exactly, that he went camping with friends and met one of the great platonic loves of his teenage years—an older girl who inadvertently changed his life.

“She said, ‘You should listen to Queen, they’re a great band,’” Iyigun recalls. “So, I asked someone to make me a tape of the Live Killers album, and that was it.”

It says something about what happened to him, listening to that album, that he currently has—in a glass case in his ��«��Ƶ home—a replica of May’s immortal Red Special guitar, signed by May. Iyigun also bought Red Special replicas for both of his daughters.

He heard Live Killers and had to learn to play guitar, is the point. Then he and some of his friends, including an ambassador’s son whose presence allowed them to practice at the Swiss embassy in Ankara, formed a band. Iyigun absolutely loved it, but making it as a rock musician in a Muslim country in the 1980s started to strike him as increasingly impossible.

“I thought, ‘OK, I need to get my act together,’” Iyigun says, so he came to the United States to earn an MBA at Boston University and then a master’s and PhD in economics at Brown University.

His parents had given him a Les Paul guitar when he graduated high school and began studying business administration at Hacettepe University—“in Turkey back then you just didn’t have these instruments, so for my parents I know this was very costly,” he explains—and as a graduate student at Brown he bought an amp and noodled around at home.

The Custom Shop Band includes, left to right, lead guitarist Murat Iyigun; singers Amy Gray, Mckenna Lee and Abbey Kochevar; drummer Kevin Thomas; bassist Elliot Elder; and keyboardist Tone Show. Steve Johnson (not pictured) also is a member of the band. (Photo: The Custom Shop Band)

But then life happened. He was beginning his career, he had a wife and young children, he was working toward tenure, and he just didn’t have time to play, for more than a decade.

Then, about 15 or so years ago, at a time he was hardly ever playing guitar, his daughters and wife gave him the game Guitar Hero for Father’s Day. He played it a bit and realized the game console was an instrument in its own way, so with typical focus “I thought, ‘I need to learn to play it well,’” he says. “It’s nothing like guitar playing, but I thought I could learn to do this, and then I was thinking about how I used to play. And that’s when I brought out my guitar.”

Learning through blues jams

“Once I started to come back to it, I realized some of my fundamentals had gone,” Iyigun says. “So, I started by taking these baby steps. I immediately hooked up with a great music teacher, Jeff Sollohub, a Berklee (College of Music) graduate and super nice guy, and every two weeks I’d work with him on a new song, on composition and things like that.

“Within a year or two, I realized I’m only going to get so good if I don’t actually go out and play. By the time I came back to it, there were so many more resources online, YouTube and things like that, and I still got a lot of joy out of playing at home. But I quickly realized there’s a limit to how much I can improve unless I get out and play. That’s when I discovered blues jams, which are the easiest way to go play live even though blues is super difficult to play well.”

He went to multiple blues jams a month around metro Denver and endured the “painful, painful learning process.” A significant moment of clarity and focus came when he saw the parallels between being onstage playing and lecturing in front of a full classroom or at an economics conference.

“I had a lot of embarrassing days where the ride home would be miserable, and I did that for a couple of years, and I was discovering other jams and just kept playing,” he says. “The limitation of blues jams, though, is you pack all the gear, get in the car, drive 40 minutes, get on the list, then the person running the jam will put these bands together and you play for 20 minutes. So, I drove there an hour, waited an hour, spent this time to play 20 minutes—and 18 minutes of that was painful.

“But after doing that a couple years, this blues band of three guys needed a guitar player, and they’d seen me play, so they said, ‘Do you want to join a band?’ I joined for about a year, and there was this point where I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want.’”

Inside, though, he was still the kid obsessed with KISS and Queen who knew all the guitar greats, not just the blues ones. He was treasurer for Mile High Blues Society, but he wanted to play rock.

Joining the band

The Custom Shop Band—the name is a reference to the custom guitars Iyigun plays—came together in a way that could be interpreted as either patchwork or destiny: friends of friends, acquaintances who know a guy, calls and emails that began with, “Hey, are you interested in being in a band?”

Elliot Elder, the Custom Shop Band bass player and a 2022 CU ��«��Ƶ graduate in jazz bass performance, was recommended by a mutual friend. Amy Gray, the original in what is now a trio of lead singers, was recommended to Iyigun by another mutual friend:

“I was singing with another band and had recently left them when I got a message from Murat,” Gray says. “He saw me in a video from that band, and he said they were looking for someone to do backups and fill in when their lead at the time was not available.

“So, I looked them up, I went to a show to see what they sounded like and saw that they played some fun songs, that they as instrumentalists all sounded good, so I thought, ‘Why not, let’s give it a chance, they all seem very nice’ and I jumped in and went with it.”

Murat Iyigun joins in on harmony during the Custom Shop Band's set list of "hits, with a twist."

Gray recruited Kochevar, whom she knew from performing with her in theater, and Lee, who had recently moved to Colorado from California and whom she knew through mutual friends. And that’s how the Custom Shop Band has worked: Iyigun founded it and continues to act as band leader and manager, but in every other way it’s a democracy.

“Murat is an awesome band leader,” Elder says. “One of the reasons why a lot of bands don’t get past a certain point, in my opinion, is the band leader doesn’t have the flexibility and communication skills to manage situations where lineups change, things change on short notice, people have different ideas about how a song should be played. Murat’s emailing venues, scheduling gigs, managing lineups and all the while teaching at CU. He puts a lot of work into it. You meet a lot of people in the music scene who don’t communicate, who don’t get details to people on time, but Murat is definitely an exception.”

The band, which also includes Kevin Thomas on drums and either Tone Show or Steve Johnson on guitar and keyboards, practices in-person when adding a new song to the set list or a new musician, but otherwise its members practice at home with versions of the songs that Iyigun sends to everyone. In keeping with the band’s democratic ethos, every member brings song suggestions to the table.

At any given show, the Custom Shop Band may open with Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and soon thereafter play “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus and “It’s Raining Men” by The Weather Girls, which might be followed by a mashup of Foreigner’s “Jukebox Hero” and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

On a Saturday night in September, at a pub and grill on a quiet street in Littleton, “So What” by P!nk gets booties to the dance floor in a joyful melee. A dude to the left is lost in his own world of intricate air guitar and a lady on the right has divested herself of shoes. A little later, as the band plays Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” the air guitarist to the left reaches a fever pitch as the band’s lead guitarist, who also happens to be a renowned economist, absolutely wails on the solo.

And transitioning smoothly into Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz,” the dancefloor still throbbing, the economist is grinning wide.

He will rock you.

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New research quantifies effects of lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans on the wider community

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 15:00:47 +0000

New research quantifies effects of lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans on the wider community Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/20/2024 - 09:00

Bradley Worrell

Study by economists is thought to be the first to quantitively estimate the effects of racial terror against Mexicans in the U.S. on U.S.-born Mexican Americans

The racially motivated lynchings of African Americans in the U.S. South are well documented, but much less well known are the racially motivated lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from 1880 to 1930 in Texas—the state with the highest rate of lynchings of Mexicans on record.

One estimate by researchers for that period puts the lynchings of Mexicans at 27.4 individuals per 100,000 population. New research suggests that the violence may have also caused long-run economic and educational harm to children in communities where lynchings occurred.

In their recently published paper, “Examining the Long-Run Impacts of Racial Terror with Data on Historical Lynchings of Mexicans in Texas,” Professor Francisca M. Antman with the ��«��Ƶ Department of Economics and fellow economist Brian Duncan with the University of Colorado Denver explore the historical lynchings of Mexicans in Texas and their long-term economic impact on U.S.-born Mexican Americans.

By merging U.S. Census records and historical data on lynchings in Texas, the economists determined that Hispanics raised in a Texas county where one or more lynchings occurred when they were a child experienced negative impacts later in life related to their earnings, education levels and home ownership rates in 1940. However, Antman and Duncan acknowledge that the estimated impacts were small and that more research is needed in this area.

Antman says she believes one reason the lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans are not widely known is that these attacks often occurred during times of more generalized violence in Texas, often associated with the Texas War for Independence from Mexico (Texas Revolution, 1835-36), the Mexican-American War (1846-48) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), a civil war between rival political factions in Mexico that resulted in violence spilling over onto both sides of the border.

Incursions by Mexican revolutionaries into Texas during the Mexican civil war fanned the flames against ethnic Mexicans in Texas, who were regularly suspected of sympathizing with Mexican revolutionaries, Antman says. The spike in lynchings of Hispanics between 1915 to 1919 corresponds to the period, with most of the lynchings occurring in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, which borders Mexico, she notes.

Victims of the Bandit War

Earlier historians of the time tended to refer to violence on the border as a “Bandit War” involving Mexican Revolutionaries, Texas Rangers, the U.S. Army and vigilantes. Antman says modern historians tend to view this period through a different lens, one that recognizes that innocent Mexicans and Mexican Americans were victims of violence during this period simply because of their race and ethnicity.

“Lynchings (of Hispanics) were often discounted with the justification of the protection of the Texas territory against this group of people,” Antman says. In some cases, the lynched men were accused of crimes such as murder or horse theft, but generally they had not been formally charged with any crime, she says.

What’s more, law enforcement—most notably the Texas Rangers—carried out some lynchings, which at the time tended to legitimize the extrajudicial killings, she adds.

The fact that newspapers in Texas at the time published accounts of lynchings suggests that the acts were largely known by the populace, Antman says. Researchers at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, have collected all of the published articles they could find about lynchings on the website Lynching in Texas, which is the site Antman and Duncan consulted for their research.

Determining long-term impacts

“To our knowledge, this is the first study to quantitively estimate the impacts of racial terror against Mexicans in the U.S. on U.S.-born Mexican Americans,” Antman and Duncan write in their paper.

Mexican workers line up for jobs in pecan orchards in San Antonio, Texas, in 1939. (Photo: Russell Lee/Corbis)

To gauge that impact, the authors took the information about the lynchings of Mexican Americans in Texas counties from the Lynching in Texas website and compared it with individual-level U.S. Census data from 1880 through 1940.

Given that the census data does not include a person’s county of birth, the researchers restricted their sample to U.S.-born Mexican Americans aged 18 to 59 in 1940 who can be linked to a 1930 or earlier census. They further limited their sample to individuals in the 1940 census who were observed in an earlier census at age 17 or younger residing in a Texas county, which the authors for simplicity refer to as the individual’s “county of origin.”

The census data were then matched to the Lynching in Texas data based on county of origin, to identify the number of lynchings in an individual’s county of origin when they were growing up, specifically at ages 0-5, 6-10 and 11-17.

In merging census and lynching data, Antman says she and Duncan wanted to gauge whether the lynchings had any apparent effect on Mexican Americans’ years of schooling, earnings and home ownership, as measured in the 1940 census. Notably, 1940 was the first year in which measures of educational attainment and earnings were collected.

Antman says this research shows that exposure to lynchings in childhood did have negative impacts on long-run outcomes for Mexican Americans, although the magnitudes are small and not always statistically significant. However, restricting the sample to the Lower Rio Grande Valley origin counties generally raises the magnitudes and statistical significance of the estimates, she says.

Given the challenges of measuring lynchings during this period, Antman says results should be interpreted with caution, as a first step in understanding the long-term harm of racial terror in the United States, but she says she hopes the paper will spur additional research.

“Hopefully this paper is just the starting point of future work, and hopefully it encourages researchers to explore other areas of the U.S. in which we know this kind of racial violence occurred, and the impacts on additional groups of people.”

Top image: Mexican young women working on a farm in Edinburg, Texas, in Feb. 1939. (Photo: Russell Lee/Corbis)

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Study by economists is thought to be the first to quantitively estimate the effects of racial terror against Mexicans in the U.S. on U.S.-born Mexican Americans.

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Free bus fare didn’t yield better air

Anonymous — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Free bus fare didn’t yield better air Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/29/2024 - 00:00

Sarah Kuta

New research by CU ��«��Ƶ PhD student Grant Webster finds that the free-fare public transit initiative didn’t reduce ground-level ozone, but may have other benefits

Grant Webster is a big fan of public transit—he takes the bus multiple times a week from his home in east ��«��Ƶ to the CU ��«��Ƶ campus, where he’s working on a PhD in economics.

So, two years ago, when he heard about Colorado’s new “Zero Fare for Better Air” campaign, he was intrigued.

The premise was simple: During the month of August 2022, the state’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) waived fares for all bus and train rides. With this free perk, state leaders hoped to encourage Coloradans to leave their cars at home and take public transit instead. They expected this incentive to reduce ground-level pollution during peak ozone season.

CU ��«��Ƶ economics researcher and PhD student Grant Webster found that the "Zero Fare for Better Air” public transportation campaign did not significantly reduce ozone pollution in Colorado.

As a bus rider, Webster was optimistic, too. But as an economist, he wanted to see the data.

“When they came out with this policy, I was like, ‘Hey, I ride the bus, I think that’s a cool idea,’” he says. “But I was also curious. Has anybody studied whether these policies actually work?”

Now, he has an answer to that question. “Zero Fare for Better Air” did not significantly reduce ozone pollution in Colorado, Webster reports in a new paper published in the journal Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice.

Using air pollution, weather, ridership and traffic data, Webster found that public transit ridership did increase during the month of free fares—by roughly 15% to 20%. But even though bus and train travel got a boost, car traffic volumes stayed roughly the same.

“The increase in ridership doesn’t seem to be reducing the number of cars on the roads,” he says. “It might just be transit users taking more rides, or people using RTD that weren’t going to take the ride to begin with.”

Informing policy

Roughly 2% of commuters in the Denver metro area use public transit as their main daily form of transportation—and the proportion is likely even smaller in other parts of the state. So, while public transit ridership saw a sizable bump percentagewise, this bump wasn’t enough to reduce ozone pollution.

For Colorado to see a 1% decrease in ozone pollution, public transit ridership would need to increase by 74% to 192%, Webster finds.

“Even if we had this big increase in ridership, it’s still such a small proportion of commuters, in terms of total pollution contributors, that we wouldn’t expect a huge decrease in ozone pollution overall,” he says.

“The transit infrastructure, the whole environment we live in here in Colorado … people are really reliant on their cars. You’d need a much bigger switch of people’s transit behaviors for this policy to be affecting overall air pollution.”

The findings are a bit of a bummer, but Webster says they’re important nonetheless. They could help policymakers use their limited dollars in different ways—ones that might be more effective at reducing pollution.

The “Zero Fare for Better Air” campaign was funded by Colorado Senate Bill 22-180 and brought back in 2023, but axed in 2024 due to cited budget constraints.

The “Zero Fare for Better Air” campaign was funded by Colorado Senate Bill 22-180 and offered in partnership with the Colorado Energy Office. RTD brought back the campaign for a second year in 2023 and expanded it to include both July and August, while Webster’s research was still underway. But, in 2024, it axed the program, citing state budget constraints.

Webster also points out that, while the campaign didn’t reduce ozone pollution as intended, it may have had other economic benefits, such as making public transit more affordable for low-income individuals or introducing new riders to the system.

Also, his findings only apply to Colorado, where overall ridership is relatively low. The picture might look very different in cities and states with more robust transit infrastructure and a higher proportion of public transit commuters, he adds. So, policymakers elsewhere shouldn’t completely rule out similar initiatives in their locales.

“In places like New York City or Washington, D.C., this type of policy might have completely different implications,” he says.

Consider other incentives

Overall, the findings suggest that, when deciding whether to drive or take public transit, the cost of the fare is not the most important factor in commuters’ decision-making process. And that’s an important takeaway: To change commuters’ behavior, policymakers may need to consider other, more compelling incentives.

You’d need a much bigger switch of people’s transit behaviors for this policy to be affecting overall air pollution.”

“When you talk about getting to work, there are so many factors at play,” Webster says. “What’s traffic going to be like? How far away is the bus station? How long do I have to wait? Can I leave in the middle of the day to go run an errand?”

More broadly, as policymakers look for novel ways to slow or halt human-caused climate change, the study also demonstrates the value of considering possible solutions through an economic lens.

“Economics provides a lot of good tools for studying these types of environmental policies,” Webster says. “Can we incentivize people to change their behavior and, as a result, change an environmental outcome? It’s a super important time to focus on the environment and our human impacts on it. And economics can play a role in studying these issues.”

Top image: Riders board a city bus in Denver. (Photo: RTD)

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New research by CU ��«��Ƶ PhD student Grant Webster finds that the free-fare public transit initiative didn’t reduce ground-level ozone, but may have other benefits.

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For some women, STEM may not be the great equalizer

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 06:00:00 +0000

For some women, STEM may not be the great equalizer Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/17/2024 - 00:00

Chris Quirk

In newly published book, CU economics alumna Susan Averett analyzes whether STEM fields offer an equal path to prosperity for all women

When Susan Averett began her study of economics as an undergraduate, she recalls that the prevailing credo in the discipline was to adhere closely to the analysis of production, consumption and related topics.

That changed when she arrived at the ��«��Ƶ to begin work on her PhD in economics. “I got really interested in the economics of gender, and (former faculty member) Elizabeth Peters, a true mentor in every sense of the word, was absolutely instrumental in that,” Averett says.

Peters taught courses in labor economics and economic demography that expanded Averett’s thinking. “It made me understand that economics can be used to look at questions like fertility, marriage and discrimination—things outside the purview of mainstream economics.”

CU ��«��Ƶ economics alumna Susan Averett researches the economics of gender, with a focus on labor and health economics and gender outcomes.

What she learned about economics at CU ��«��Ƶ informed Disparate Measures: The Intersectional Economics of Women in STEM Work, her recently released book written with Mary Armstrong.

Averett, now the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, has gone on to become a renowned scholar in the field of economic demography, which looks at how economic factors affect various groups of people in society. Her work to date encompasses labor and health economics, with a focus on gender outcomes.

In Disparate Measures, Averett and Armstrong analyze how different groups of women have fared in STEM fields, and whether the presumption that STEM jobs broadly present a pathway to prosperity holds up.

Well-documented pay gap

The pay gap between women and men in the workplace is well documented, Averett notes. A Pew Research Center report last year found that white women earned 83% of what white men earned, and Black and Hispanic women earned far less. And while the report stated that the proportion of women in managerial positions in STEM fields was on the rise, they are nowhere near parity with men.

Averett says the idea for the book was to analyze exactly how much women had benefitted from STEM employment—sometimes called the STEM premium—and to do it in a granular way, looking at subgroups of women to identify differences in outcomes for women in varied demographics.

“The idea is that STEM is being sold as this great equalizer for women, good for innovation and good for the economy,” Averett says. “We took a different tack, and asked what actually happens once women are in the workforce.”

In the book, Averett and Armstrong, whose field is women and gender studies, worked from the massive trove of economic and demographic data in the American Community Survey, which the U.S. Census Bureau generates from questionnaires sent to a large sample of households.

Disparate Measures analyzes how different groups of women have fared in STEM fields, and whether the presumption that STEM jobs broadly present a pathway to prosperity holds up.

Averett and her colleague wrote eight case studies on different subgroups of women, four on more standard demographics (Black women, American Indian and Alaska Native women, Asian and Pacific Islander women and Hispanic/Latina women), and four on groups of women not often separated out in studies of this kind (foreign-born women, women with disabilities, Queer women, and mothers).

The approach is what Averett calls an economic analysis of the population groups in an intersectional way, meaning that the study takes into account that people belong to more than one demographic group at the same time, such as women who are Black, or a men who have a disability.

“Everybody has different identities, and the idea was to make groups that have been invisible, visible,” Averett explains. “For example, with Black women, we looked at foreign-born Black women versus native-born Black women. With Asian women, we separate out Pacific Islander from AAPI, because they are usually grouped together.”

Inequality in the STEM economy

The results of the analysis are stark. Among Black women, 2.7% work in a STEM field, as opposed to 11% of white men. “In general, Black women as compared to white non-Hispanic men are poorly represented in the fields of engineering and STEM management,” Averett says. “Furthermore, Black women do not have wage parity with white men in any area of STEM work. They earn 75% of white men’s wages in STEM management, 76% in computer or math jobs, 78% in the physical and life sciences and 79% in engineering.”

In STEM-related occupations, such as medical fields, foreign-born Black women earn more than those born in the United States, across the board, she notes.

Averett says she hopes that this granular study will prompt policymakers and those who manage personnel in STEM fields to think equality in STEM. “Our use of an intersectional lens allows us to see that economic inequality is woven into the STEM economy. STEM wage gaps should be part of our thinking about how groups fare in STEM, but a continued focus on the STEM premium distracts from that.”

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In newly published book, CU economics alumna Susan Averett analyzes whether STEM fields offer an equal path to prosperity for all women.

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The U.S. labor market can affect ‘people who are not even here,’ research finds

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 18:47:56 +0000

The U.S. labor market can affect ‘people who are not even here,’ research finds Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/22/2024 - 12:47

Daniel Long

A recently published paper co-authored by Brian Cadena finds deep connections between the U.S. and Mexican economies

That the job market in Phoenix can affect a child’s education in Mexico may strain credulity, but it’s nevertheless true, according to a recent paper co-authored by Brian Cadena, a ��«��Ƶ associate professor of economics.

People from specific regions in Mexico tend to migrate to specific regions in the United States, and when U.S. work dries up in some areas, those migrants tend to return to Mexico, Cadena and his co-authors, María Esther Caballero of American University and Brian K. Kovak of Carnegie Mellon, found.

Their paper, published in the Journal of International Economics in November, explores the U.S. labor market’s influence on the lives of people in Mexico by comparing how neighboring Mexican counties, or “municipios,” fared during the Great Recession.

Brian Cadena, a CU ��«��Ƶ associate professor of economics, and his research colleagues explore the U.S. labor market’s influence on the lives of people in Mexico by comparing how neighboring Mexican counties fared during the Great Recession.

To perform their analysis, Cadena, Caballero and Kovak drew upon data from the Matrícula Consular de Alta Seguridad (MCAS), a governmental organization that issues identity cards to Mexican migrants.

Unlike either the U.S. or Mexican census, MCAS provides in-depth, granular information on migrant workers, specifying the municipios they leave and where in the United States they settle.

MCAS is a treasure trove, says Cadena. But it wasn’t long ago that researchers didn’t know how to use it. Cadena, Caballero and Kovak changed that with another paper they published in 2018, which validated the MCAS data and thereby opened up a whole range of potential research.

“This identity-card data really allowed us to drill down and make tight comparisons between municipios,” says Cadena.

The strength of networks

A key finding that emerged from the MCAS data is that people from the same municipio often move to the same cities and states in the United States. “People follow their networks,” says Cadena. And these networks are so strong that migrants from nearby municipios often end up hundreds of miles apart in the States.

Migrants from the municipio of Dolores Hidalgo, for example, tend to move to Texas, while those from nearby Jaral del Progreso generally relocate to Chicago, California and the Southwest. Same region in Mexico, different time zones in the United States.

The close proximity of the municipios is important for the kind of research Cadena, Caballero and Kovak are doing, Cadena explains, because it cuts down on confounding variables. Neighboring municipios experience the same weather, suffer the same droughts, follow the same or similar laws, etc., which means differences in their economic outcomes are likely due to something they don’t share—the job market in the cities and states where their migrants moved.

To unearth these differences, Cadena, Caballero and Kovak measured the job-market losses in the U.S. regions linked to each municipio and then compared the economic outcomes in the municipios connected to harder-hit regions to those connected to softer-hit regions.

As it happens, labor demand in Texas survived the Great Recession relatively unscathed, so the municipios of the migrants who ventured there remained stable. The American Southwest, however, suffered some major blows, and so the municipios connected to that region exhibited several changes.

(Un)expected observations

Some of those changes were unsurprising, says Cadena.

“One of the things we’re finding is how connected these two economies are," says CU ��«��Ƶ researcher Brian Cadena of the United States and Mexico. On the one hand, the stark differences in what someone can earn and what the labor market looks like in one country as opposed to the other suggests that we have made the separation between those countries real and meaningful. On the other hand, we are certainly not islands.”

“When work dried up, more immigrants returned to Mexico, and fewer new immigrants came from that source community.” This then led to a fall in remittances, or money transfers from migrant workers to their families back in Mexico.

Yet Cadena, Caballero and Kovak also observed some changes they didn’t expect. One was that more women joined the Mexican workforce.

“This is called the added worker effect,” says Cadena. “When the primary earner of a household”—in this case, the migrant laborer—“loses their job, it’s a common reaction by the household to say, ‘Let’s send someone else to work.’”

Another unexpected change was a drop in school retention. “We found some suggestive evidence that a loss of jobs in the United States reduced investment in schooling in Mexico. We saw more schooling dropout, especially at transition ages, when kids move from one level of schooling to the next,” says Cadena.

Blurred lines and better choices

What do these findings suggest about the perceived separation between these two countries and their economies?

It makes that separation “a little fuzzier,” says Cadena.

“One of the things we’re finding is how connected these two economies are. On the one hand, the stark differences in what someone can earn and what the labor market looks like in one country as opposed to the other suggests that we have made the separation between those countries real and meaningful. On the other hand, we are certainly not islands.”

Realizing this, Cadena believes, could inform policymaking, specifically regarding immigration.

“When we’re thinking about immigration policy—when we’re thinking about all these things that affect the low-wage labor market—we are making policy that has a real and noticeable effect on the lives of people who are not even here,” he says.

“I’m not a politician, but I think that a more holistic sense of all the impacts of the choices we make as a country could help us make better choices.”

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A recently published paper co-authored by Brian Cadena finds deep connections between the U.S. and Mexican economies.

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Early childhood health interventions have ‘big, multi-generation impacts,’ research finds

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 16:01:04 +0000

Early childhood health interventions have ‘big, multi-generation impacts,’ research finds Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/06/2024 - 09:01

Daniel Long

Tania Barham’s research suggests that it doesn’t take much to give impoverished people a better start to life

It was the late ‘90s, and Tania Barham, future associate professor of economics at the ��«��Ƶ, was in Yemen, working as an economist for the World Bank, which had teamed up with UNICEF to improve that country’s health, education and water.

Like the World Bank and UNICEF, Barham believed she was helping people, making a positive difference in their lives. But something was missing.

Much of CU ��«��Ƶ researcher Tania Barham's work draws on data from Bangladesh.

“I had a moment where I’m like, ‘There’s almost no evidence,’” Barham recalls. “There was little data to understand if a project was successful or not in terms of development.”

It was a life-changing realization, one that convinced Barham to go back to school, earn her PhD and research how to bring people out of poverty over the long term.

Unique data

Much of Barham’s work draws upon data from Bangladesh.

In the ‘70s, Barham explains, the Bangladeshi government rolled out the Maternal and Child Health and Family Planning Programme (MCH-FP) in the Matlab area, a rural pocket of land just east of the Meghna River.

The purpose of this program was twofold: to provide a basic health care package for impoverished families—including family planning, nutritional rehabilitation and vaccinations—and to do so in a way that allowed researchers to study the program’s effectiveness.

“They wanted to see if this thing worked,” says Barham.

One way the program designers did this was by setting up a control area and a treatment area, so that different health outcomes between the two could be traced back to the interventions. Another was by keeping detailed records of the specific individuals and families who received the treatments.

“They kept regular demographic surveillance data, and then they would do census of the study areas every so often,” says Barham.

This surveillance data shows a number of things: if someone migrated or married, if someone died, if over time there have been any changes in household structure. And it goes deep.

“We could link everybody back to their original household from before the project began,” says Barham.

Residents of Kashadaha village, Bangladesh, visit the Kashadaha Anando school Oct. 12, 2016. (Photo: Dominic Chavez/World Bank)

So rich is this data that Barham and fellow researchers were able to conduct follow-up surveys of the treatment subjects starting in 2012, decades after MCH-FP began.

Barham wanted evidence, but this was more than she could have ever hoped for.

“This data doesn’t exist almost anywhere else.”

The effects

In a paper now under review, Barham and coauthors Brachel Champion, Gisella Kagy and Jena Hamadani explore the effects of MCH-FP on human capital.

Human capital, says Barham, refers to how equipped a person is to be successful in life. “It’s a person’s education. It’s their health. It’s their cognition. It’s their ability to solve problems. It can be social-emotional skills too.”

In other words, to improve a person’s human capital means to improve that person’s chances of escaping poverty or avoiding it in the first place.

Barham and her colleagues found that those in the Matlab area who received treatments showed increased height, a sign of improved health. They also found that kids in the treatment area exhibited improvements in cognition and, among the males, higher education and higher math scores.

But the most important finding, says Barham, was that these effects spanned generations. The second generation benefitted as much as the first. The human-capital gains were ongoing.

In another paper, this one published in December 2023, Barham and coauthors Randall Kuhn and Patrick S. Turner describe how MCH-FP affected migration.

Traditionally, many men in the Matlab region have migrated to Chittagong or Dhaka for work, or sometimes farther afield to countries like Qatar, where the higher-paying jobs are. But MCH-FP interrupted this narrative.

Students participate in school activities at the Sahabatpur Daspara Ananda school in Sahabatpur village, Bangladesh, Oct.12, 2016. (Photo: Dominic Chavez/World Bank)

“We thought we would find some traditional thing—you improve people’s education, and they go and get better jobs, and they still migrate to get them,” says Barham. “But that wasn’t the story we found at all. It was actually, I think, a more exciting story.”

Barham, Kuhn and Turner found that, instead of migrating, the Bangladeshi men were getting better jobs at home and therefore staying with their families.

“This is so important,” says Barham. “We see so much migration happening in the world right now, and here is an example which you almost never see of a program where people decided to stay.”

The big takeaway from both papers, says Barham, is that even a modest health package can have “big, multi-generation impacts.”

The big picture

Barham’s ultimate goal is to help those living in poverty, especially children.

“I care about people having the best start to life. Because if you don’t have a good start to life, it’s just that much harder to be successful later on.”

Now, propped up on decades of data and research, she hopes to spread the word and encourage investment in programs similar to MCH-FP.

“Good interventions help, and they accumulate,” she says. “We have to tell that story.”

Top image: Rozina (far left), comforts her nephew, Tanvir (center left), along with her mother, Shefali, in Dhaka, Bangladesh on Oct. 11, 2016. (Photo: Dominic Chavez/World Bank)

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Tania Barham’s research suggests that it doesn’t take much to give impoverished people a better start to life.

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Student undertakes global DIY climate action

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 21:23:00 +0000

Student undertakes global DIY climate action Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/17/2023 - 14:23

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU ��«��Ƶ senior Runzhe Li will attend major U.N. climate conference as independent scholar

Runzhe Li left his native Beijing for the ��«��Ƶ in part because of his interest in nature.

In major cities around the world, people can “go to a national park, far off site, and it was more like travel,” says the senior, who is majoring in economics with a minor in atmospheric and oceanic sciences (ATOC).

“Here (in ��«��Ƶ), we have such a good environment, with the nearby mountains and wildlife, the environmentally sensitive urban design and public policies worth learning from. By the way, ��«��Ƶ is heaven for outdoor people.”

While he knew he wanted to study economics, he also was drawn by CU ��«��Ƶ’s long-standing reputation in the natural sciences.

Runzhe Li, a CU ��«��Ƶ senior studying economics, will attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP28, as an independent scholar.

“Having a hard-science background is important for environmental and economic research,” he says.

But it wasn’t until he visited the upper Amazon region in the past summer and witnessed firsthand Peru’s contrast between the natural environment and economic development that he realized he wanted to focus specifically on the intersection of climate science and economics.

“I took a four-hour boat ride into the primary jungle, and stayed there for half a month,” says Lee, as his American friends usually call him.

“I saw astounding starry skies and incredible wildlife, but it was hard to ignore the current state of limited economic development in that region of Peru. How to protect the environment while safeguarding the right to development is an area I hope to explore in the future.”

Now, Lee will attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference, aka COP28, as an independent scholar, from Nov. 30 through Dec. 12 in the United Arab Emirates.

“I am honored to attend such an important conference as a CU ATOC student, but I value the opportunity to interact with people around the world who care about climate issues in various fields—politicians, academics, multinational companies and organizations and the media. We know there are a lot of disagreements today, so we need to get to know what they are and know what the various stakeholders are thinking,” he says.

“I believe a balance can be created between the economy and the climate.”

The conference is being described as “a milestone moment when the world will take stock of its progress on the Paris Agreement,” the 2015 agreement within the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change addressing greenhouse-gas emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance. COP28 will “help align the efforts on climate action, including measures that need to be put in place to bridge the gaps in progress,” according to the United Nations.

Lee plans to visit a friend in the UAE, one of the world’s largest oil producing countries, before returning to ��«��Ƶ.

“It’s the engine of the world, very important for industrial economics,” he says. “I grew up in China and then went to school in the U.S.—the largest demand side of the energy market. Now I want to go to the supply side and see how their business and society works.”

Once he’s back in ��«��Ƶ, Lee will speak to students in an introductory course on climate change at the invitation of ATOC Associate Professor Jennifer Kay.

“I hope the information I bring back and my personal passion will help those freshmen students understand why we need (ATOC), and why we all need a stronger science background, and not just ideology,” Lee says.

“The timing is ideal for students (in the) introductory class. We focus the last two weeks of the semester on climate policy and solutions. I’m so inspired by our students,” says Kay, speaking of Lee.

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CU ��«��Ƶ senior Runzhe Li will attend major U.N. climate conference as independent scholar.

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Why must we protect nature? Because we can, philosopher says.

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 16:11:08 +0000

Why must we protect nature? Because we can, philosopher says. Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/05/2023 - 10:11

Tim Grassley

In the book ‘The Wild and the Wicked,’ Benjamin Hale argues that because people have the unique capacity to care for the environment, they have a moral obligation to do so

2016 was especially hot. A strong El Niño event spiked global temperatures and made the year one of the Earth’s warmest on record, yet the heat did not inspire action from Congress, whose skeptical majority claimed that climate change was a hoax meant to diminish freedom and disrupt a stable economy.

In December of that year, while many environmentalists were producing studies of the economic costs and benefits of conservation, Benjamin Hale’s book The Wild and the Wicked presented an entirely different reason to care for the natural environment.

Hale contends that economic and value-based approaches to environmentalism—claims about nature’s beauty, intrinsic worth or market value—can provide a morally precarious basis for environmentalism. These arguments often assume that nature is inherently valuable and lovable—a portrayal that ignores the ways in which nature can harm humans and that much of humanity’s history has been spent keeping nature at bay.

“I am challenging what you might consider to be the status quo in the pro-environment discourse,” says Hale, an associate professor of philosophy at the ��«��Ƶ. “Not because I’m anti-environment at all, but because I think that, to an extent, we in the environmental community fall easily into turns of phrase and ideas that otherwise go uninterrogated just because they are commonplace within our community.”

I’m trying to re-inflate a commitment to critical thinking and, ultimately, to democracy by suggesting that the burden is on us to offer justifications for taking actions, whatever they may be.”

Instead, Hale argues, people should care for nature because they are uniquely capable of doing so. When human beings are environmentally conscientious, they live up to one facet of their moral potential as human beings.

“I’m trying to re-inflate a commitment to critical thinking and, ultimately, to democracy by suggesting that the burden is on us to offer justifications for taking actions,” Hale notes, adding, “whatever they may be.”

When nature is wicked

Hale’s argument took shape when he worked as an environmental activist. While camping with other environmentalists, he heard many enthusiastically praise vistas and forests, as if this alone were the primary reason to protect nature. The praise, though, felt incomplete to Hale because he also thought about the harshness of nature—of mountain lions, forest fires and the steep drop of cliff faces.

At roughly the same time, he studied natural resource policy at the University of Arizona and worked on water policy in Washington, D.C., at the Congressional Research Service in the Library of Congress. Hale was disheartened to see that the democratic process boiled down to the pushing of individual agendas.

Those experiences helped him see the problem of environmentalists’ seeking to convince members of the public to protect nature either because it is sublime or contains valuable resources.

In 2004, he earned his PhD in philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and dove into research integrating the practical observations he’d made while working in environmental policy with the much more abstract conceptual insights in ethical and political theory.

The Wild and the Wicked, written by Benjamin Hale, is an exploration of moral obligation, expanding on the reasons why people should push through adversity and choose to protect nature.

Some of these observations grew into The Wild and the Wicked. In the book, Hale asks readers to observe the ways that nature can upend people’s lives by noting a series of natural disasters and bad events, some from his life and others more generally.

In the book’s first section, he sets the horrific 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami in the Indian Ocean beside the 1945 nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. Hale notes that both events caused equivalent, devastating human loss and economic damage, but to say they are the same ignores that the latter event was human-caused.

The distinction is important because, as an act of humans, Hiroshima can be understood as morally right or wrong. When environmentalists try to defend nature using value-based arguments (e.g., that conservation offers some economic gain or is fundamentally “good”), they overemphasize instruments of measurement.

Hale writes in his book, “If we think that we can pass judgment on an action simply by appealing to the end state of the world (or even the expected end state of the world), we become little more than moral mathematicians, assigning values of good and bad, better and worse, to possible outcomes. … The human project of ethics is reduced, then, to a simple actuarial project of crunching the numbers. If that’s the case, the mathematics of morality must be a funny math indeed.”

The book’s punchline is that the reason we should protect nature is because we are able to. It places the burden on the shoulders of each one of us to offer clear justifications to one another when making decisions about what to do. We need to have a clear discussion about what's permissible and what's not permissible.”

Hale steadily builds a case that human beings are uniquely able to care for the environment. Because they have the capacity to make judgments and decisions with clear justifications, people have a moral obligation to protect nature.

“The book’s punchline is that the reason we should protect nature is because we are able to,” Hale argues. “It places the burden on the shoulders of each one of us to offer clear justifications to one another when making decisions about what to do. We need to have a clear discussion about what's permissible and what's not permissible.”

Away from economic decision-making and toward a better democracy

Hale says he believes this shift in thinking would change environmental discourse. Rather than forming policies by weighing the intrinsic, extrinsic or instrumental interests of individuals or groups, people could choose the best policies through democratic processes, guided by a moral compass.

I'm laying groundwork for some form of democratic decision-making to take priority or precedence over economic decision-making, which is one of the preferred ways in which policy is set nowadays, and particularly environmental policy. What should have precedence is that discourse, that democratic discourse, and not the spreadsheet or the ledger of costs and benefits, which is the way that we often do it now.”

“I'm laying groundwork for some form of democratic decision-making to take priority or precedence over economic decision-making, which is one of the preferred ways in which policy is set nowadays, and particularly environmental policy,” Hale says. “What should have precedence is that discourse, that democratic discourse, and not the spreadsheet or the ledger of costs and benefits, which is the way that we often do it now.”

By emphasizing discussion and the capacity of communities to come to shared understandings, people can work democratically to bring about positive change. For Hale, this is a far more optimistic outlook on humanity’s ability to make morally right decisions. Rather than insisting that all people are inherently selfish, he says he believes they can come together and make decisions that improve their communities.

“It’s a problem to believe that democracy, well done, is just aggregating the wants of every person,” Hale says. “To be living in a democracy like we live in now, we should be making decisions about what’s good for the community, even if it flies in the face of some of the things that we want.”

“We need to act with reason that is good and justified.”

Top of page: Hale, an associate professor of philosophy, is the author of The Wild and the Wicked. Photo by Benjamin Hale.

In the book ‘The Wild and the Wicked,’ Benjamin Hale argues that because people have the unique capacity to care for the environment, they have a moral obligation to do so.

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In the 1950s, many wives financed their husbands through college

Anonymous — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 19:00:28 +0000

In the 1950s, many wives financed their husbands through college Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/20/2023 - 13:00

Jaxon Parker

A study co-authored by a CU ��«��Ƶ economist reveals how young wives played a significant role in financially kick-starting their families during the economic prosperity of the 1950s, also opening the door to greater equality for women later in the century

The 1950s were marked by rising prosperity, as the U.S. economy grew rapidly and unemployment remained low. They are also remembered for strict gender roles: men as breadwinners and women as family caretakers.

But a study published recently in Journal of Labor Economics suggests that many wives provided for their husbands through college, freeing their families from the credit constraints of higher education.

Murat Iyigun, a professor of economics at the ��«��Ƶ who co-authored the paper with Jeanne Lafortune of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, is interested in a phenomenon of the 1950s that has puzzled sociologists and economists: Why were couples marrying younger while men became more educated than women?

At the top of the page: While the University of Florida honored its male graduates, the University Dames recognized supportive wives with "Putting Husband Through" degrees in ceremonies like this one in 1960. Awarded for their "loyal support and unfailing patience," these women often worked and raised families while their husbands attended class. The Dames, sponsored by the University Women's Club, organized in 1948 and helped women learn skills needed for their husbands' future professions through monthly talks on everything from meat purchasing to home decor. The Dames later disbanded, but the Women's Club (faculty wives and female faculty members) continues today. (From UF Today, Winter 2009) Above: Professor Murat Iyigun's current interests of study are economics of the family, economic development and growth, political economy and cliometrics.

According to Iyigun, “the 1950s was an anomaly. The 1880s looks in some sense like now, because people used to get married later and the education levels between husband and wife were more comparable.”

Unlike other cultures, married couples in the United States are expected to move out of their parents’ homes and into their own, which can be expensive. In the poorer economy of the early 20th century, both spouses had similar but lower levels of education and often chose to put off their marriages until later in life.

“But the ’50s is the American heyday. It’s the golden era of the post-Second World War and there’s a huge American middle class. Housing became very cheap, which explains early marriages because younger people could afford it. And suddenly, the education premium for men rose,” Iyigun says.

On the flipside, financial returns for women receiving college degrees remained lower than for men.

“Besides other factors, discrimination kept the returns to schooling for women lower than those of men in the 1950s, ’60s and even the early ’70s,” Iyigun says.

However, later in the 1980s, “college and higher degrees started to pay off more for women.” With more women obtaining degrees alongside men by the late 20th century, marriages at later ages increased.

Sociologists and economists have offered different theories about how marriage timing and the educational gap between genders made the 1950s stand out. To solve this mystery, Iyigun created an analytical model that accounted for the changes in the start-up cost of marriage and tuition throughout the 20th century, and whether this generates an interaction between when couples married and became educated.

Comparing the model’s predictions with historical data, it successfully mirrored the trend of early marriages and wide educational gaps between genders in the 1950s, and showed that the pattern of later marriages and comparable education levels between genders returned in the late 20th century.

“Using our model, with a drop in home prices and an increase in the education premium for men, we now have couples who can marry early, and if it made sense for the husband to get an education, the wives typically supported them; they’re joining the labor force starting in the ‘50s,” Iyigun says.

For Iyigun, his model supports the claim that the 1950s was an exceptional moment in the economic and domestic history of the United States.

“It was a cultural phenomenon that even institutions recognized. Schools were having a separate diploma ceremony for the wives of men who were getting a degree, and their degree was called the PhT (Putting the Husband Through). They were congratulating women for supporting their husbands getting an education.”

“Even modern obituaries cite the PhT; it was something women were proud of doing,” Iyigun says.

It was a cultural phenomenon that even institutions recognized. Schools were having a separate diploma ceremony for the wives of men who were getting a degree, and their degree was called the PhT (Putting the Husband Through). They were congratulating women for supporting their husbands getting an education."

Although the PhT phenomenon was primarily an economic strategy to help husbands become educated sooner during marriage, Iyigun believes the fact that women were supporting their husbands through college laid the groundwork for the major cultural changes of the late 20th century.

Today, “the ’50s seems like a bygone era, but I think there’s a backdrop where the culture has shifted, and much of the family structure, men and women’s roles in the household, in the workplace and in society drastically changed in many ways for the better,” Iyigun says.

Iyigun, along with Lafortune and Paula Calvo of Arizona State University, are working on a paper investigating how divorce laws factored into the marriage age, education and economic trends of the 20th century.

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