Experts in health, education, governance, energy and social justice collaborate to learn how different levers of action can impact communities.
Research Spotlight
Causes of Indonesia’s Forest Fires
New research features a 30,000-village case study of the 2015 fire season on Sumatra and Kalimantan and asks which villages, for a given level of spatial fire risk, are more likely to have fire.
Do Immigrants Assimilate More Slowly Today Than in the Past?
Using millions of historical census records and modern birth certificates, new research documents that immigrants assimilated into U.S. society at similar rates in the past and present.
Background: Maternal health during pregnancy is a key input in fetal health and child development. This study
aims to systematically describe the health behaviors of pregnant women in rural China and identify which
subgroups of women are more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors during pregnancy.
Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP) is an aggregate measure of the monetary value of final ecosystem services, or the direct benefits that people derive from nature. In this study, we focus on the 'Chang-Zhu-Tan' (CZT) urban agglomeration—an emerging megacity of over 15 million people situated on the Yangtze River—as a case study of the dynamics of ecological production amidst rapid urbanization. In this study, we couple a spatial-temporal analysis of regional ecological change based on remote-sensing data with economic valuation methods (e.g. travel cost method) using official statistics and survey data. We find that while the land cover of natural ecosystems decreased slightly between 2000 and 2015, their quality—and therefore economic value—greatly improved. From 2000 to 2015, the GEP of CZT increased by 56.77%. In particular, the value of regulating services grew by 7.43% (calculated using inflation-adjusted prices). GEP can reflect nature's contribution to human well-being. At the same time, its long-term trends can serve as an indicator of the extent and quality of local and regional ecosystems, thereby providing a corrective or complement to more conventional measures of development. Although urbanization increases spatial constraints on the management of natural capital, progress in ecological protection and restoration can still improve the quality of ecosystems and the services they provide. Our study shows how GEP, and the value of natural capital it reflects, can grow amidst the pressures of rapid urbanization.
National Bureau of Economic Research,
November 1, 2020
This paper studies how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected labor demand using over 100 million posted jobs on one of the largest online platforms in China. Our data reveals that, due to the effects of the pandemic both in China and abroad, the number of newly posted jobs within the first 13 weeks after the Wuhan lockdown on January 23, 2020 was about one third lower than that of the same lunar calendar weeks in 2018 and 2019. Using econometric methods, we show that, via the global supply chain, COVID-19 cases abroad and in particular pandemic-control policies by foreign governments reduced new job creations in China by 11.7%. We also find that Chinese firms most exposed to international trade outperformed other firms at the beginning of the pandemic but underperformed during recovery as the Novel Coronavirus spread throughout the world.
