education
Dr. Mantis
Dr. Tamma Carleton has been awarded the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association!
Her dissertation examined the effects of climate change on the wellbeing of populations (e.g. effects of extreme heat and crop failure on suicide rates in India), and the extent to which they are able to use resources (e.g. groundwater) to adapt to those changes (sometimes adaptation gaps remain).
all grown up…
We are very proud that Jon Proctor will finally leave the bay area to do his postdoctoral work at Harvard!
Jon was awarded a fellowship at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and a fellowship at the Harvard Data Science Initiative, so he may never have to leave and get a real job.
old enough to do research
We are psyched that Julia Longmate will hanging around Berkeley to pursue her doctoral studies in the Energy Resources Group this coming Fall!
Julia has been a central team member on the Quantitative Sustainable Development Project, developing new methods to measure soil and topography value with econometrics, designing systems for identifying water pollution sources, and modeling nasty smells… We won’t miss Julia as much as Sandy, since we are confident she will come by to visit for the free snacks:) But we are still excited to see what comes next for Julia!
future Dr Sum!
We are very excited for Sandy Sum who will be heading to UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management in the Fall to pursue her doctoral studies!
Sandy has been a core team member on the Quantitative Sustainable Development Project for three years, developing new methods of valuing natural capital, modeling pasture growth econometrically, and developing new approaches for contingent valuation using revealed preferences, among many other things. We will miss her, but are very excited for her next big step!
Joshua Graff Zivin, Matthew Neidell and Sol Hsiang published a new article "Temperature and human capital in the short and long run". Analyzing over 24,000 student exams and following individual students over time, they demonstrate that cognitive performance in mathematics declines at high temperatures, but not in reading or verbal exams.
Read the article here.
Felipe Gonzalez has a new working paper Collective Action in Networks: Evidence from the Chilean Student Movement, demonstrating how millions of students across schools in Chile influence one another to participate in a growing social movement. Felipe demonstrates how the number of individuals in each student's social network, in addition to each student's physical neighborhood, increases the likelihood that specific students will participate in the 2011 student movement. He finds strong evidence of a "tipping point" where if 40% of a student's class is participating, then the entire class "tips" and begins attending the protest. This is important because it is the first empirical evidence testing classical models of social network dynamics in revolutionary environments.
Locations of over 50,000 student protesters in Santiago, Chile during the 2011 student movement