On Thursday, January 28 join us for a discussion on what UAA researchers have found on how COVID-19 has impacted mask wearing in Anchorage, fishing decisions in Bristol Bay and how rural Alaskans describe their experience with the pandemic.
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ISER faculty are working to inform the Municipality of Anchorage's COVID-19 efforts through a partnership between ISER, the UAA Division of Population Health Sciences, and the UAA College of Arts and Sciences. The group is involved in three distinct projects. First, Dr. Cueva, Dr. DeFeo, and Dr. Berry contributed to a series of publications focusing on specific areas in which the pandemic has impacted Anchorage and its residents, with recommendations for monitoring further impacts and potential responses/interventions. Of the published papers, Dr. Cueva and Dr. DeFeo took the lead on Education; considering the pandemic’s effect on early childhood, K12, and postsecondary systems, they noted the impacts of school and facility closures on students and communities, and provided recommendations to limit negative outcomes and plan for the future. Dr. Berry authored a paper on the economic impact of the hunker down order.
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Economists, both nationally and in Alaska, are frequently asked to assess the economic costs of the steps taken to limit the spread of COVID-19. The economic impacts are huge; the US is experiencing rates of unemployment not seen since the 1930s in the Great Depression. But the benefits of saving lives by reducing deaths due to COVID-10 area also very large. In a recent a working paper, “The Impacts of the ‘Hunker Down’ order in Anchorage,” Assistant Professor Kevin Berry used the concept of the economic value of a statistical life to undertake an approximate comparison of the economic costs (in lost income) and economic benefits (in saved lives) of the Municipal response to the coronavirus outbreak. His work combines epidemiological modeling of how COVID-19 could have spread without the Hunker Down order with the value of a “statistical life”. The results suggest that the economic benefits of saving human lives to date has far exceeded the economic costs in lost income.
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Faculty members Dr. Mouhcine Guettabi and Dr. Kevin Berry answer questions about the COVID-19 pandemic in the latest releases of Ask a UAA Expert. Dr. Guettabi answers questions related to the State economic consequences while Dr. Berry addresses pandemic economics. Check out the videos!
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The Institute of Social and Economic Research’s (ISER) Dr. Kevin Berry recently co-wrote an article with Dr. Katherine Lee (University of Idaho) published in The Hill. The piece, Why a go-it-alone approach to combatting the coronavirus won't work, addresses the current coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) and why we need coordinated international efforts in order to minimize the overall effects.
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The Institute of Social and Economic Research’s Professor Kevin Berry recently discussed the coronavirus with both Alaska Public Media and KTUU. He says the oil, fishing, tourism and cargo industries may be especially susceptible to the effects of the outbreak.
“These things will probably slow down the economy because, within China, people are being told to stay inside, not move around,” Berry commented. “So we can expect the economy as a whole to slow down because of this. There’s going to be an impact on things like oil.”
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On a recent Talk of Alaska episode, ISER's Dr. Kevin Berry was one of the guests that discussed pandemic preparedness and what has been learned from the 1918 outbreak of the Spanish flu which killed millions worldwide and devastated rural communities in Alaska.
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced it would award $18.3 million across 16 projects to researchers funded by the National Science Foundation's Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems (CNH2) program.
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This summer, Alaska’s high temperatures broke records causing more Alaskans than ever to experience the effects of widespread wildfires. Wildfires, along with unstable permafrost, and rain-in-winter are natural hazards of climate change that put residents and property at risk. Assessing the costs, risks, and actions necessary to adapt to or mitigate damage from these hazards in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Whitehorse in the Canadian Yukon, is the subject of a newly funded 4-year, $1.1 million National Science Foundation project, led by ISER’s Jennifer Schmidt.
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Can countries be fair, prosperous, and green? That’s one of the questions that Kevin Berry, assistant professor of economics at ISER, considered with his colleagues at a recent meeting of the Beijer Young Scholars Programme in Stockholm, Sweden.