Investigación

Highlights

• Ex ante analysis is used to predict housing locations for transit displacees.
• New housing locations are likely to increase housing cost burdens of displacees.
• New locations show higher overall rates of heavy rail use.

Abstract:

Chicago’s South Side has long been characterized as a “transit desert” – an area with high transit inaccessibility and insufficient infrastructure to meet residents’ needs (Jiao & Dillivan, 2013). Without adequate transit, residents cannot reach employment opportunities or regional amenities – contributing to economic, spatial, and social marginalization. The Chicago Transit Authority’s proposed Red Line Extension (RLE) is designed to connect the city’s far south side neighborhoods to Chicago’s core. Given the scope of the RLE, 175 parcels have been chosen for demolition, meaning that a similar number of households face displacement to make room for the RLE right of way – which may have potentially negative consequences in realizing the subsequent benefits of improved transit access. In this article, we perform an ex-ante analysis of RLE induced displacement. Specifically, we: 1) predict potential location choices that transit displacees are most likely to choose; and 2) analyze these locations in relation to access to transit, amenities, employment, and housing affordability, among others. Within the context of transportation planning, ex-ante analysis is important because it can minimize unintended and negative consequences of transit-induced displacement – like decreased transit access and a loss of potential neighborhood improvements – by predicting potential relocation choices for displacees. Such predicted choices can help planners and decision-makers better understand the trade-offs for directly affected households and thereby allow planners and decision-makers to assist in relocation assistance that maximizes the benefits of the necessarily displaced.

The Internet has been often described as a tool that fosters the inclusion of traditionally marginalized people in the democratic process. Yet, if the type of device used by people to access the Internet impacts their online democratic engagement, uneven Internet penetration and differences in the devices used by social groups will result in a deeper democratic divide. After discussing the impact of the types of internet use and type of access devices on civic engagement, we postulate 3 hypotheses on how democratic values and type of access to the Internet—place and devices—are related to the civic use of social media. We use data from a Valparaíso Regional poll in Chile in 2017, 2018 and 2019 to test those hypotheses. People who access the Internet via mobile phones are less likely to use social media with a civic purpose, while those who access the Internet at home or work are more likely to do so. Since low-income sectors primarily access the Internet via mobile phones while higher income groups have a wider array of Internet connection options, the rapid growth of cell phone use for accessing the Internet risks deepening social and income gaps in civic engagement.

No existen acuerdos respecto al rol de la accesibilidad monetaria a frutas y verduras frescas (o acceso en general) sobre niveles de obesidad. En este artículo exploramos si es que el acceso a frutas y verduras frescas se relaciona con mejores indicadores biométricos, tales como peso y el índice de masa corporal. Usando propensity score matching, encontramos que los años de educación se relacionan con menores niveles de obesidad, mucho más que el ingreso per cápita del hogar. Nuestros resultados son consistentes tanto cuando analizamos a la población general como cuando tomamos a un subconjunto de agricultores y vendedores de mercados tradicionales, quienes esperamos tengan mayor acceso a frutas y verduras. De esa manera, políticas públicas que se enfoquen en educación más que en aumentar los ingresos de los hogares pueden ser más efectivas en la reducción de índices de obesidad..

Short-term climate conditions may affect crop yields and vintage quality and, as a consequence, wine prices and vineyards’ earnings. In this paper, we use a CGE model for Chile, which incorporates detailed information about the value chain of the wine sector in the country. Using information for the 2015-2016 harvest, we calibrate climate shocks associated with a bad year for the wine industry in Chile, when premature rains occurred in important wine regions, reducing the area harvested and leading to wines with less concentrated flavors, particularly for reds. We model the climate shocks as a technical change in the grape-producing sector (quantity effect). Moreover, we model quality effects as a shift in the foreign demand curve for Chilean wine. Given the specific economic environment in the model and the proposed simulation, it is possible to note the reduction of Chilean real GDP by about 0.067%. By decomposing this result, we verify that the quality effect has a slightly greater weight compared to the quantity effect.

Spatial concentration in Latin America, especially in the southern cone, reaches high levels in all dimensions. Despite significant economic growth in the last two decades, trade openness, the return to democratic regimes and reductions in the Gini coefficients the primacy indexes of most Latin American countries remain relatively constant and among the highest in the world. This situationchallenges most regional and urban economics theories that predict a reduction in spatial concentration as development proceeds, after an initial period of concentration. Furthermore, Latin American countries could be trapped in processes of agglomeration without growth. The objective of this article is twofold: first, we describe some characteristics of spatial concentration and its persistence in Latin America with special emphasis in the case of Chile; and second, we propose future research lines related to the need of rebalancing Latin American spatial economies focusing on the importance of institutions as an explanation of the persistence of spatial concentration.

As mining activity generally occurs far away from metropolitan areas, governments tend to forget the problems that communities in mining regions face. Centralized government systems and, more importantly, a lack of a robust understanding of the effects of mining impacts on communities and regions, explain in part the lag of development in mining regions and countries. This paper discusses these aspects and introduces eight different papers (comprising the Special Issue: Territorial development and mining in Chile) discussing the impacts that mining activity brings to local economic activity and societal outcomes using the case of Chile, one of the most important mining countries in the world. We conclude this invitation to a territorial turn in the study of mining-based economic development with a set of key research topics we believe would benefit from further research to improve our understanding of the temporal and spatial dynamics between mining activity and development across territories.

We study the relationship between harsh parenting strategies, including psychological and physical aggressions that do not constitute abuse, on early childhood cognitive and socio-emotional development. We estimate a value-added model that controls for a rich set of child, mother, and family characteristics, from a nationally representative sample of Chilean children aged 52–83 months. We find harsh parenting is significantly associated with lower verbal skills (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) of a magnitude of 0.06 standard deviations, and with increased behavioral problems (Child Behavior Check List), by 0.11 standard deviations, including internalization, externalization, and sleep problems. We also find that the more systematic (persistent) harsh parenting is, the stronger the association; the association is similar for boys and girls; reaches its peak at about 5 years of age; and it is stronger for children with less educated mothers.

Peer effects are an important contributing factor in the learning process. Most of the prior literature on peer effects focuses on the characteristics of peers rather than examining the structure of peer networks. We attempt to measure not only the impact of peers but also the structure of the peer network. In particular we are interested in the characteristics of students’ study groups along several dimensions: quality, heterogeneity, size and cohesion. Using pre-college characteristics of students and a random assignment into sections in their first year, we construct instruments of the study group measures to control for endogeneity of the network formation. Our OLS and IV estimates suggest that peer quality improves student performance, and that the breadth and cohesion of students’ network positively affects student outcomes. We also find significant heterogeneity of the results depending on network characteristics. Our findings can be used to assist university administrators or professors to choose criteria for sorting students into study groups.

In this theoretical note, we propose the GProbit model as an alternative to gravity models to estimate grouped-data flows. This is a model based on the random utility theory, which is consistent with the principle of population behavior. Instead of migrant counts, the dependent variable of the GProbit model of flows consists of a number of observed proportions. It allows explaining the propensity to migrate from any origin to a destination, which is an interesting relative concept not affected by the size effect. For this reason, it is expected to have better fit and less problems of non-normality, as illustrated by an application for the internal migration flows of the Spanish regions.