Research Seminars at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy

Recent natural and manmade disasters have had significant regional economic impacts. These effects have been muted, however, by the "resilience" of individual businesses and of regional markets, which refers to the inherent ability and adaptive responses that enable firms and regions to avoid potential losses. In this seminar, we illustrate some of these contributions in a case study of the sectoral and regional economic impacts of a disruption to the Portland Metropolitan Water System in the aftermath of a major earthquake. Several attempts have recently been made to identify the key indicators of community resilience and to group them into an overall resilience index. In this seminar, we will also examine existing resilience indices in relation to economic principles and evaluate their potential to gauge and improve post-disaster economic recovery, with a focus on businesses. Adam Rose is a Research Professor in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, and Coordinator for Economics at USC’s Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE). Before coming to USC, he served as Professor and Head of the Department of Energy and Environmental Economics at the Pennsylvania State University. Much of Professor Rose’s research is on the economics of natural and man-made hazards. He currently serves as an advisor on disaster resilience to the United Nations Development Programme and recently served on a National Research Council panel on Earthquake Resilience. He recently completed a DHS-sponsored study examining tradeoffs and synergies between urban security and commerce. Professor Rose’s other research area is the economics of energy and climate change policy. As a consultant to the United Nations, he played a major role in the development of the first proposal for a system of globally tradable emission allowances. More recently, he has advised government agencies in several U.S. states on the development of cap & trade programs and on the job impacts of climate action plans.

USC Price's weekly Research Seminars each semester allow distinguished faculty at Price to present either recently published work, or work that is in progress for feedback and critique. This seminar features Dr. Howard Greenwald, Professor at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy.

Featuring Darius Lakdawalla, Professor in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and Quintiles Chair in Pharmaceutical Development and Regulatory Innovation as well as Director of Research at Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics

Featuring Gary Painter, Professor in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and discussed by Chris Redfearn, Associate Professor in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy

Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta is one of the most productive regions in China and is considered to be key center of the export economy of the country. This year’s China Lab was engaged by the Party University of Shenzhen to develop a strategy to change the economy to a more balanced consumer and production economy, with the objective of improving the environment, particularly air quality, and sustaining long term economic growth. The Strategy was developed by a class of 23 students was presented to the leadership of the Party University and the Ministers of the Municipality of Shenzhen. The presentation will discuss the strategy, how it was developed, the reaction of the client and recent follow up actions. Mark Pisano is a Senior Fellow in the School of Policy Planning and development. He is a faculty member in the Bedrosian Center for Governance, teaching a course on Megaregions and conducting research on infrastructure financing. He is Co-Chairman of the Federal System Panel for the National Academy of Public Administration. He is Co-chairman of America 2050, a national organization dedicated to developing the third century growth strategy for America. Mark Pisano directed the activities of the Southern California Association of Governments from 1976 to 2008, the nation’s largest regional planning agency. The counties of Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura, and cities within these counties are members of the Association. The purpose of this voluntary association of local governments is to provide an open forum where region-wide problems can be explored and comprehensive plans dealing with air and water quality, transportation, regional growth and development, housing, and other areas critical to the region can be developed.

Common social norms in Western liberal democracies, based on openness, access, trust, freedom of speech, and diversity are increasingly compromised by a growing obsession with safety, security, and surveillance in the post 9/11 era. We explore the implications for the public space and life in contemporary cities. Even before 9/11, the increasing privatization of the public realm – following the neoliberal argument for the “enclosure of the commons” -- has contributed to the decline of the intensity and diversity of social contacts and the changing functions, purposes, and uses of public space. This trend has been further exacerbated by the growing preoccupation with control and surveillance in the public realm to promote public safety, provoked in part by the terrorist attacks of the last decade. In out talk, we will examine the roots, factors, and consequences of these phenomena, which some have coined "the assault on public space," and considers their implications for the future of public space. SPEAKERS:  Tridib Banerjee, Professor, James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning,  Director, Graduate Programs in Urban Planning, USC SPPD, has focused his research, teaching, and writing on the design and planning of the built environment and the related human and social consequences. In particular, he is interested in the political economy of urban development, and the effects of globalization in the transformation of urban form and urbanism from a comparative international perspective. His current research includes implementation of smart growth policies, converting brown fields to affordable housing, designing for residential density and walkable communities, and transit oriented development. He is principal investigator of USC's Center for Economic Development and serves as the director of the Community Development and Design Forum. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is Associate Dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs and Professor at the UCLA Department of Urban Planning. Her area of specialization is urban design, physical and land use planning. She has published extensively on issues of downtown redevelopment, inner-city revitalization, transit-oriented development, design and transit safety, and parks and open spaces. She has served as a consultant to the Transportation Research Board, Federal Highway Administration, Southern California Association of Governments, South Bay Cities Council of Government, Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative, Mineta Transportation Institute, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Greek government, and many municipal governments on issues of urban design, open space development, land use and transportation.

Not all Chinese cities are alike, and these differences are reflected in the challenges posed by urbanization and the corresponding responses cities undertake. From a national perspective, however, similarities are essential for formulating broad urbanization strategies. Our research addresses this dilemma through a cluster analysis based on key word coding of principal tasks outlined in the 11th Five-Year Plans of 286 major cities in China. In effect, the Five-Year plan becomes a proxy survey instrument. Seven distinct clusters emerge, and an additional analysis using socio-economic data from the China City Statistical Yearbook is undertaken to further identify the defining characteristics of each cluster and prototypical cities within them (Jilin, Liuzhou, Zhuzhou, Nanping, Xinyu, Chengde and Mianyang). Finally, implications for national urban planning strategies are discussed. Speaker: Eric Heikkila is Professor and Director of International Initiatives at the School of Policy, Planning, and Development (SPPD) at the University of Southern California (USC), where he has been a member of the faculty for twenty-five years. His research addresses a wide range of topics bearing on the geographical, economic, cultural and historical factors that influence urban development trajectories. He has applied spatial analysis, fuzzy sets and agent based modeling to study urban structure. Other aspects of his work include a more qualitative, policy oriented approach to urban development issues, especially in the context of the Asia Pacific region. He is conversant in several languages, including French and Mandarin, and has spent sabbatical leaves as a visiting scholar on separate occasions at National Taiwan University (Department of Geography), Peking University (Department of Urban and Environmental Sciences), and Chinese University of Hong Kong (Department of Geography and Resource Management). Shortly after joining USC, he became founding Executive Secretary of the Pacific Rim Council on Urban Development (PRCUD), a globally based non-governmental organization that continues to thrive under his initiative, and that organizes regular forums in host cities throughout the Asia Pacific region. As Director of International Initiatives, Dr. Heikkila has broad responsibility for planning and coordinating SPPD’s global engagement.

The Long-term Impact of Medicare Payment Reductions on Patient Outcomes (http://www.nber.org/papers/w16859) This study examines the long term impact of Medicare payment reductions on patient outcomes using a natural experiment - the Balance Budget Act of 1997.We use predicted Medicare revenue changes due to BBA, with simulated BBA payment cuts as an instrument, to categorize hospitals by degrees of payment cuts (small, moderate, or large), and follow Medicare patient outcomes in these hospitals over a 11 year panel: 1995-1997 pre-BBA, 1998-2000 initial years of BBA, and 2001-2005 post-BBA years. We find that Medicare AMI mortality trends stay similar across hospitals when comparing between pre-BBA and initial-BBA periods. However, the effect became measurable in 2001-2005: hospitals facing large payment cuts saw increased mortality rates relative to that of hospitals facing small cuts in the post-BBA period (2001-2005) after controlling for their pre-BBA trends. We find support that part of the worsening AMI patient outcomes in the large-cut hospitals is explained by reductions in staffing level and operating cost following the payment cuts, and that in-hospital mortality is not affected partly due to patients being discharged earlier.

Evidence shows that high Medicare spending is not associated with better health outcomes at a regional level and that high spending in hospitals is not associated with better process quality. The relationship between hospital spending and inpatient mortality is less well understood. This paper attempts to determine the association between hospital spending and risk-adjusted inpatient mortality.

The policy debates over the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), and current efforts to repeal it or hamper its implementation, are fueled by starkly different views of the ability of private markets to deliver health care effectively. This presentation reviews where health care in America stands relative to the rest of the world, and where it is going, with or without Obamacare. It reviews the experience with the market for prescription drug insurance established in 2006 under Medicare Part D, identifies the prerequisites for a healthy market for health insurance, and draws lessons from this for the insurance regulations and exchanges planned under Obamacare. Daniel L. McFadden, PhD. was recently appointed the Presidential Professor of Health Economics at USC by President C.L. Max Nikias. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor McFadden is the 2000 Nobel Laureate in Economics for his work in econometric methods for studying behavioral patterns in individual decision-making. Following the completion of his PhD in 1962 at the University of Minnesota, Professor McFadden went to the University of Pittsburgh as a Mellon postdoctoral fellow. The following year, he joined UC Berkeley's economics department. In 1979, Professor McFadden moved to the economics faculty at MIT, and in 1991 he returned to UC Berkeley. Among his many awards and honors, Professor McFadden received the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economics Association in 1975; he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1977 and to the National Academy of Science in 1981; in 1985 he delivered the Jahnsson Foundation Lectures in Helsinki, Finland; in 1986 he won the Frisch Medal from the Econometrics Society, and in 2000 he received the Nemmers Prize in Economics from Northwestern University.

Planning, Agenda-Setting, & the Environmental Media

Medicare Part D and Pharmaceutical Advertising

Household formation analysis in an economic recession featuring SPPD Professor Gary Painter. Dowell Myers will start off with commentary, Gary Painter will respond, and then we open it to the floor.