Selected Publications:

Perez-Felkner, L., Felkner, J., Nix, S., & Magalhães, M. (in press). The Puzzling Relationship between International Development and Gender Equity: The Case of Postsecondary Education in STEM in Cambodia. International Journal of Educational Development.

Gender inequality persists in certain science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) postsecondary fields. Notably, cross-national evidence suggests the STEM gender gap is smaller, not wider, in less developed nations. This is the first known case study to examine this gap within a developing country: Cambodia. This study investigates the following question: how does development – specifically socioeconomic and gender equity indicators – affect women’s share of enrollment in specific STEM and STEM-related fields? Merging two sources of national data, we leverage provincial census figures and institutional administrative data to estimate women’s enrollment share in STEM as well as in specific fields (i.e., accounting, information technology, and health). Findings show women’s share of STEM and information technology majors is larger outside the capital. Further, socioeconomic development and urbanization indicators distinctly predict women’s share of health and information technology majors. These fields also have an inverse relationship between women’s share and gender egalitarian characteristics. We discuss potential explanations and implications for gender and inequality in higher education, within and between nations, in the context of larger theoretical debates on the nature of sex segregation.

D’Aoust, O., Lall, S. V., Aguilar, J., Felkner, J., & Henderson, J. V. (2017). Scaling up and coordinating investments in physical structures and infrastructure. Africa’s cities: Opening doors to the world (pp. 138-158). doi: 10.1596/978-1-4648-1044-2_ch6

Describes the challenges of sequencing the costs of developing housing, infrastructure, and industrial premises in African cities and of accomplishing interdependence among investments in physical structures and infrastructure. Path dependence implies that investors need to anticipate what other structures will be built nearby; investments affect expectations, which in turn affect investments. Early installation of infrastructure constitutes a coordinating device that endures, shapes urban landscapes, and leads to higher land values. Though African cities generally have low levels of road investment, reduction in transportation costs, brought about by road investments or other improvements, can help increase connectivity between business and residential areas, improving intra-city mobility and reducing commuting costs. Integrating urban planning and regulation with transport investments can enhance ordered and efficient transport development, as it has in Curitiba, Brazil, a city that has lower greenhouse gas emission levels, less traffic congestion, and more livable urban spaces than similar cities in Brazil.

Linkow, B., Felkner, J., & Lee, H. (2015). Economic impact evaluation of highway improvements in the republic of Georgia using a robust quasi-experimental design and GIS. Paper presented at the Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting, Washington DC.

The authors present the results of a rigorous quasi-experimental design economic impact evaluation of the more than US$ 200 million improvement of approximately 220 km of highway in the Republic of Georgia by the Millennium Challenge Corporation, constructed between 2008 and 2010. The evaluation methods were implemented: a treatment-control difference-in-difference, a dose-response continuous treatment approach that estimated project impacts across geography, and a matched difference-in-difference using Propensity Score Matching (PSM). Data sources included a 12-round traffic count and speed survey, a village-level survey of 960 settlements, and 36 rounds of a quarterly household-level survey, as well as high-resolution geographic information system (GIS) road network data. It is found that the roads improvements increased the volume of traffic by an average of 44.2 vehicles per day (4.2%), while the average speed increased by 13.6 km/h (24.4%). The project also led to a 26.9% increase in the number of industrial facilities (i.e. canneries, factories, agricultural processing facilities, and similar enterprises) near the project roads. The authors do not observe changes in cropping patterns or land use at the community level. The project had impacts on the prices of a number of food products on local markets, but in a complex way. No strong evidence is observed on income, consumption, asset ownership, employment, or utilization of health and education services. The study contributes to the literature by presenting the results of rigorous quasi-experimental design methodology that further utilizes highly accurate GIS data to improve the precision and allow for the estimation of impacts across geography.

Felkner, J., Townsend, R., & Tazhibayeva, K. (2012). The impact of climate change on rice yields: The importance of heterogeneity and family networks. Paper presented at the Nobel Symposium, Stockholm, Sweden.

We specify a three-stage production function for rice cultivation which incorporates the sequential nature of both production shocks, including weather, and input choices based on sequentially updated information sets of history of realized shocks and observed changes in crop growth. The production function is CES across stages, thus taking into account substantial complementarities between different phases of the biophysical crop growth process, in contrast to the substitute nature of commonly used Cobb-Douglas specification. This framework is particularly well-suited for evaluating the effect of climate change on crop cultivation practices and yields. We apply the model to 11-year panel of rice farmers in Thailand. The panel structure of our data allows us to analyze both the cross sectional effects of weather shocks and climate change on yields, and the effects on the mean levels and shape of yield distribution for individual farmers. We find substantial heterogeneity among farmers in the effect of both weather shocks and climate change on yields. We consider two alternative climate change scenarios for Southeast Asia, one with mild increases of temperature and rainfall throughout the year and the other with more extreme temperature increases and less rainfall during months of rice cultivation. While from the farmer’s perspective uncertainty of yields decreases with more extreme climate change, cross sectional heterogeneity in uncertainty increases. Our focus is on detailed partial equilibrium analysis of the effects of climate change on yields at the crop-plot level, accurate understanding of which is essential for global general equilibrium modeling of environmental changes. We integrate our economic model of rice production with soil science crop growth modeling, weather simulators, and global climate change models.

Felkner, J. S., & Townsend, R. M. (2011). The geographic concentration of enterprise in developing countries. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(4), 2005-2061. doi: 10.1093/qje/qjr046

A nation’s economic geography can have an enormous impact on its development. In Thailand, we show that a high concentration of enterprise in an area predicts high subsequent growth in and around that area. We also find spatially contiguous convergence of enterprise with stagnant areas left behind. Exogenous physiographic conditions are correlated with enterprise location and growth. We fit a structural, micro-founded model of occupation transitions with fine-tuned geographic capabilities to village data and replicate these salient facts. Key elements of the model include costs, credit constraints on occupation choice, and spatially varying expansion of financial service providers.

Felkner, J., Tazhibayeva, K., & Townsend, R. (2009). Impact of climate change on rice production in Thailand. American Economic Review, 99(2), 205-210. doi: 10.1257/aer.99.2.205

Our goal is to evaluate crop yield impacts from likely climate changes for Southeast Asia. To do so we link soil science crop modeling, weather simulators, and global climate change modeling into an integrated economic model of multi-stage rice production. The economic model is estimated with detailed monthly data on inputs, operations, and environmental data over a five year period. We then forecast impacts under two different future economic scenarios, one assuming high future global anthropogenic pollution emissions, and the other assuming low. We compare results of the integrated economic model with those of a biophysical model, inputting into both the stochastic realizations of a weather generator, calibrated against the present, no climate benchmark and against the two climate mild and severe climate change scenarios. The more realistic forecasts from socio economic model thus include important farmer behavioral/ mitigation strategies. We discuss both aggregate/average impacts as well heterogeneity in response.

Townsend, R., Felkner, J., & Tazhibayeva, K. (2009). Impact of climate change on rice production in Southeast Asia: Towards better farmer production functions. IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 6(37), 372044. doi: 10.1088/1755-1307/6/37/372044

We propose a series of steps in an effort to understand climate change, and to understand its potential impact on crop production in Southeast Asia. We also present an innovative approach to estimating multi-stage farmer production functions through integration of a scientific crop model with a simultaneous estimation of an economic production function. First, we estimate detailed multistage production functions for rice crops in northeastern Thailand, using seven years of both individual and household-level monthly data collected from villages in Thailand as part of the Townsend Thai Survey at the University of Chicago (cier.uchicago.edu). Input data are disaggregated according to agricultural production stages (planting, growing, harvesting). We integrate this approach with output from a biological crop growth simulation model, the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT), which takes as inputs environmental variables such as rainfall, temperature and soil characteristics. The combination of socioeconomic and bio-physical models is rare. It enables us to model the sequential nature of both farmers’ decision making and bio-physical plant growth processes, as well as their intercausality. It lets us separate direct biological effects of rainfall, temperature and soil from effects due to farmers’ response. Using the multistage approach we better understand diversity in yields over households, even within a village. We determine how much agricultural production variability is due to fixed
heterogeneity such as soil, how much local temporal variation in soil moisture is due to environmental inputs such as rainfall and slope, and to separate these from the effects due to farmers’ responses. In addition, we shall also assess whether credit and insurance markets are functioning well. Second, our modeling of bio-physical/socioeconomic intercausality provides a powerful climate change assessment tool: we use these estimated production functions to simulate yields using the historical distribution of rainfall, obtained from the nearest national Thai meteorological rainfall stations, then feed in alternative weather change offsets and histograms from climate change models. This allows a direct look at the potential impact of climate change on output utilizing combined socioeconomic and bio-physical models, assuming no other mitigation strategies, as well as providing an improved model for farmers’ assessment of risk and decision-making under climate change scenarios. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we can use this simulation tool to model how farmer crop management changes could allow adaptation to climate changes, assessing which adaptations could minimize crop yield losses, given farmers’ socioeconomic and financial credit constraints, and insurance considerations.

Brown, D., Fay, M., Lall, S. V., Wang, H. G., & Felkner, J. (2008). Death of distance? Economic implications of infrastructure improvement in Russia. European Investment Bank Papers, 13(2), 126-148.

We examine the economic implications of infrastructure investment policies that try to improve economic conditions in Russia’s peripheral regions. Our analysis of firm-level industrial data for 1989 and 2004 highlights a ‘death of distance’ in industrial location, with increasing concentration of new firms in regions with good market access. We assess the geographic determinants of growth econometrically and identify market size and proximity to Moscow and regional infrastructure as important drivers of productivity for new and for privately-owned firms. Simulations show that the benefits of infrastructure improvements are highest in the country’s capital region where economic activity is already concentrated. Policies that divert public investment towards peripheral regions run the risk of slowing down national economic growth.

Von Hoffman, A., & Felkner, J. (2002). The historical origins and causes of urban decentralization in the United States. Joint Center for Housing Studies, Graduate School of Design and John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

See also Google Scholar page