And Then There Were Numbers: Infrastructure, Economics, and Agatha Christie

The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

How did the technology requirements of the Clean Water Act affect municipal finances? Chicago native Rhiannon Jerch investigated this question for her dissertation at Cornell University, and was awarded a C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship in 2017 to support that research. The fellowship, named for a former Lincoln Institute of Land Policy board member and Columbia University economics professor, assists PhD students whose research complements the Institute’s work in land and tax policy.

An environmental and urban economist, Jerch would go on to teach first at Temple University, and then at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is now an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics.

In this conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Jerch discusses the connections between infrastructure and urban growth, shares a common misconception about economists, and reveals a relatively low-cost way for cities to boost transit ridership.

JON GOREY: What is the general focus of your research?

RHIANNON JERCH: I’m primarily interested in infrastructure and how it affects urban growth—that’s the thread that connects my different lines of research. Infrastructure is one of these interesting concepts, because it’s really crucial to how cities develop and function, but it’s a public good, so it’s susceptible to all kinds of free riding and under investment. I’m very curious about how policies that help promote or improve infrastructure affect how cities grow.

JG: Can you talk about your research into the Clean Water Act and municipal finances?

RJ: Writing that paper, which has been conditionally accepted at an environmental journal, has been a very long process, and the Lincoln fellowship was really helpful in giving me the time and resources to really move it along.

One of the cornerstone pieces of the Clean Water Act regulation required a type of treatment technology in a wastewater treatment plant. So if you were a city with any kind of operating sewerage system, you were basically beholden to this regulation. A lot of communities had kind of rudimentary treatment processes, and the Clean Water Act came in and said, ‘No, you need to meet this minimum standard.’

The federal government gave some money for cities to comply with this, but not 100 percent of the cost. So I was curious to know, what did this policy do to city finances? Where did the money come from? And then, given that you have this kind of dual impact, where the city is now more expensive to live in, but it also has higher water quality, how do those things balance out? Do you see more people wanting to live in these now cleaner but more expensive places?

The effect was largest for smaller communities. There was kind of a net zero effect for larger cities … but you do see a lot of people wanting to move into these smaller cities after their water gets cleaner, compared to places where there is not a big improvement in the water quality.

JG: What are you researching now, or hoping to work on next?

RJ: The project that’s the most complete has to do with transportation, but we’re looking not necessarily at built infrastructure, but technological infrastructure. The paper looks at how the availability of real-time tracking in Google Maps changes how likely people are to take public transit. We track how ridership in transit systems changes before and after a given transit agency had their system’s real-time information integrated into Google Maps, and you see this pretty robust, significant increase. I think we have a 13 percent average increase, over three years, in transit ridership. That’s been a very fun paper to write. We’ve also found some evidence that it is, in fact, pulling people out of cars. We look at commuting modes, and we do see people are less likely to commute in a car and more likely to commute on public transit, which is pretty cool.

Another fun project that’s in its early phases came about from one of my undergraduates at Temple University. He’s from Stowe, Vermont, a ski resort town, and he had grown up hearing this anecdote that Stowe was this very successful tourism-focused town compared to the next town over—which was also mountainous, also beautiful, but not a tourist hotspot—because the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) had built the ski resort that you see in Stowe today.

So he had this idea: Do you see this in other parts of the country, where the CCC, for whatever reason, decided to invest a bunch of time, money, and effort into building out a recreation site in one particular area and not in another, and does that have long-term effects on the industry structure of that place, how many people live there, how wealthy it is? So we have information on recreation-focused CCC camps across the US, and we’re creating a century-long panel data set on county-level outcomes from the US Census.

Another project I’m working on that’s related to infrastructure has to do with blackouts and how it affects criminal activity. In the 1970s there was this major blackout in New York City, followed by three days of pandemonium. And blackouts are a lot more frequent now than they used to be; they’re about five times more frequent than they were 20 years ago, and most of that increase in frequency is driven by severe weather.

So we have this issue of increasingly severe weather, but infrastructure is not necessarily changing that much—in some cases, it’s becoming less and less resilient, it’s old—so we have more and more blackouts. We’re trying to understand, if a city experiences a blackout, how does that affect rates of crime? And how is that mediated by whether or not the blackout is caused by severe weather?

JG: What’s one thing you wish more people understood about economics?

RJ: Economists are not married to this idea that markets work great and prices are a perfect measure of value. I think environmental economists, in particular, spend most of their time thinking about ways in which that’s not true—in which markets don’t work, prices don’t reflect value—and trying to come up with other creative ways to really measure the value of things that cannot be transacted in a marketplace, like infrastructure or urban amenities.

JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

RJ: I have two kids, so I am not staying up at night for anything. I need sleep! But when you look at the data on the age of US infrastructure, and the lack of investment in infrastructure, it’s pretty alarming. There’s a lot of evidence that infrastructure is extremely important. Roads are important. Airports are important. Railroads are very important. They connect people, they allow for job access, they allow for more productivity across cities, more idea exchange. There’s very little question about these things, but it is alarming how few public dollars are devoted to infrastructure projects.

In some ways, this project I’m doing on Google Maps is quite hopeful. It’s demonstrating that you don’t necessarily need to spend a ton of money building out new infrastructure. People are interested in taking public transit if they just have very good information on when, where, and how to access it. And that’s a fairly low-cost intervention to get people to engage in low-carbon behavior. I found that really reassuring.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?

RJ: I’ve been reading a book called Owning the Earth [by Andro Linklater]. It’s about the history of property ownership, globally, and its evolution. The continual question the author is asking himself is, ‘How do you weigh the economic benefits of very well defined property rights and a well functioning property market, versus the public good and public welfare constraints?’ Because in a lot of ways, they work in opposition.

And he goes into philosophy from some of the greats, like Locke and Hobbes, about these questions. So it’s been an interesting way to bring these fundamental topics you learn about—like Tiebout and property rights and all this stuff—to a more philosophical framework about what it really means to possess land from a cultural perspective. On a lighter note, I just finished reading my first Agatha Christie novel, And Then There Were None, and it was incredible. She’s such an amazing writer.

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: University of Wisconsin Associate Professor Rhiannon Jerch. Credit: UW-Madison Agricultural and Applied Economics Faculty Profile via YouTube.