Research Skills

< Applied Economics – my field >

• Urban Economics

• Spatial Economics

• Environmental Economics

• Applied Econometrics

• Spatial Econometrics

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■ Micro Economics 
 

• Urban Economics:
  Cities exist because production or consumption advantages arise from higher densities and spatially concentrated location. After all, spatial competition forces firms and consumers to pay higher land rents — rents that they would not be willing to pay if spatially concentrated economic activity did not yield cost savings or utility gains. Economists have long studied the forces leading to these proximities in location, focusing first and foremost upon the importance of transport costs.
  — John M. Quigley
   

• Spatial Economics:
  Spatial economics is concerned with the allocation of (scarce) resources over space and the location of economic activity. Depending on how this definition is read, the realm of spatial economics may be either extremely broad or rather narrow. On the one hand, economic activity has to take place somewhere so that spatial economics may be concerned with anything that economics is concerned about. On the other hand, location analysis focuses mostly on one economic question, namely, location choice. This is only one decision among a large number of economic decisions.
  — Gilles Duranton
   

• Environmental Economics: 
  The fundamental theoretical argument for government activity in the environmental realm is that pollution is an externality- an unintended consequence of market decisions which affect individuals other than the decision maker. Providing incentives for private actors to internalize the full costs of their actions was long thought to be the theoretical solution to the externality problem. The primary advocate of this view was Arthur Pigou, who in The Economics of Welfare (1920) proposed that the government should impose a tax on emissions equal to the cost of the related damages at the efficient level of control.
  — Robert N. Stavins
  
   

■ Econometrics
 

• Applied econometrics:
  Econometrics aims to give empirical content to economic relations for testing economic theories, forecasting, decision making, and for ex post decision/policy evaluation. The term ‘econometrics’ appears to have been first used by Pawel Ciampa as early as 1910, although it is Ragnar Frisch who takes the credit for coining the term, and for establishing it as a subject in the sense in which it is known today (see Frisch, 1936, p. 95, and Bjerkholt, 1995). By emphasizing the quantitative aspects of economic relationships, econometrics calls for a ‘unification’ of measurement and theory in economics. Theory without measurement can have only limited relevance for the analysis of actual economic problems; while measurement without theory, being devoid of a framework necessary for the interpretation of the statistical observations, is unlikely to result in a satisfactory explanation of the way economic forces interact with each other. Neither ‘theory’ nor ‘measurement’ on its own is sufficient to further our understanding of economic phenomena.
  — John Geweke, Joel Horowitz, and Hashem Pesaran
   

• Spatial econometrics:
  Spatial econometrics is concerned with models for dependent observations indexed by points in a metric space or nodes in a graph. The key idea is that a set of locations can characterize the joint dependence between their corresponding observations. Locations provide a structure analogous to that provided by the time index in time series models. For example, near observations may be highly correlated but, as distance between observations grows, they approach independence. However, while time series are ordered in a single dimension, spatial processes are almost always indexed in more than one dimension and not ordered. Even small increases in the dimension of the indexing space permit large increases in the allowable patterns of interdependence between observations. The primary benefit of this modelling strategy is that complicated patterns of interdependence across sets of observations can be parsimoniously described in terms of relatively simple and estimable functions of objects like the distances between them.
  — Timothy G. Conley