Latest Publications

May 1, 2024
Trade policy reform, retail food prices and access to healthy diets worldwide
By: Gilbert R; Costlow L; Matteson J; Rauschendorfer J; Krivonos E; Block SA; Masters WA
Recent use of least-cost diets as a measure of global food security revealed that over 3 billion people are unable to afford sufficient nutritious food for an active and healthy life, driving demand for policy changes to improve access and affordability. This study quantifies the role of imports in consumer prices, matching retail prices in 144 countries to imports by origin of the item or its main ingredient, resulting in a total of 13,846 pairs of a retail price and its import cost in 2017. We find that 55% of retail items had some active imports supplementing domestic production, and of those around 48% have nonzero tariffs whose average effective rate is around 6.7% of the imported commodity price. Over all countries for which data are available, the share of consumer prices for least-cost healthy diets that is attributable to tariffs and non-tariff measures averages 0.67% and 2.45% globally. The highest restrictions are on nutrient-rich vegetables, fruits and animal-sourced foods. Access to bulk commodities from diverse origins is essential for food and nutrition security, providing a greater diversity of foods and food ingredients at lower and more stable prices than can be grown at any one location. On average over all food products that are imported, 83% of the retail price is domestic value added after arrival. We conclude that food imports are best understood as inputs to the domestic production and distribution of retail items, with consumer prices and growth of the food sector dependent on the cost levels, infrastructure and institutions underlying each product's entire value chain.
Copy Citation Gilbert, R., Costlow, L., Matteson, J., Rauschendorfer, J., Krivonos, E., Block, S. A., & Masters, W. A. (2024). Trade policy reform, retail food prices and access to healthy diets worldwide. World Development, 177. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106535 Copied to clipboard.
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Apr 1, 2024
Regularized hidden Markov modeling with applications to wind speed predictions in offshore wind
By: Haensch A; Tronci EM; Moynihan B; Moaveni B
Offshore wind power is rapidly becoming an essential component of the transition to clean energy. As turbine design capacities continue to increase, there is a growing interest in monitoring both individual turbines and entire wind farms to ensure their performance while also reducing the levelized cost of energy. However, obtaining reliable and comprehensive data on these structures can be challenging, as it often requires costly and potentially dangerous installation procedures and significant computational resources. Therefore, it is critical to predict the needed information to properly assess the performance of offshore wind turbines when not available. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a modified Hidden Markov Model (HMM) framework-based strategy and a companion Python library, Hela. The proposed HMM-based framework incorporates a “smart” initialization strategy and regularization to overcome some of the limitations of applying HMMs to experimental cases. This Python library introduced in this paper is a highly flexible and customizable HMM library for training and inference. This work is all carried out within the use-drive context of offshore wind.
Copy Citation Haensch, A., Tronci, E. M., Moynihan, B., & Moaveni, B. (2024). Regularized hidden Markov modeling with applications to wind speed predictions in offshore wind. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 211. doi:10.1016/j.ymssp.2024.111229 Copied to clipboard.
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Mar 1, 2024
Democratic Ceilings: The Long Shadow of Nationalist Polarization in East Asia
By: Hur A; Yeo A SAGE Publications 584 - 612
<jats:p> East Asian democracies, long seen as the success stories of the Third Wave, have curiously co-existed with illiberal partisan competition. We argue that such patterns are symptoms of long-standing democratic stagnation, rather than democratic regress. We trace the entrenchment of illiberal competition to nationalist polarization in the early phase of democratization—a common phenomenon in Third Wave democracies where nation-building and democratization pressures coincided. Party polarization can take many forms, but when it centers on mutually exclusive nationalist visions from the outset, it redefines the end of democratic competition as state capture and justifies whatever means necessary, even those that violate democratic norms, to achieve it. Through a comparative analysis of Taiwan and South Korea, we show that when democratization tends to institutionalize, rather than alleviate, pre-existing nationalist conflicts, it can seed endemic barriers to the habituation of democratic norms, imposing a ceiling on democratic progress. </jats:p>
Copy Citation Hur, A., & Yeo, A. (2024). Democratic Ceilings: The Long Shadow of Nationalist Polarization in East Asia. Comparative Political Studies, 57(4), 584-612. doi:10.1177/00104140231178724 Copied to clipboard.
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Mar 1, 2024
Identifying disadvantaged communities in the United States: An energy-oriented mapping tool that aggregates environmental and socioeconomic burdens
By: Popovich N; Figueroa AJ; Sunter DA; Shah M
This paper defines a policy-relevant nationwide composite index to identify communities disproportionately impacted by environmental, energy, and climate injustices in the United States. We review existing vulnerability indicators and indices to assess the tradeoffs of different design parameters, including variable selection, geographic unit, dimensionality reduction, weighting, and aggregation methods. From this methodological review, we create the first nationwide, census tract-level index of cumulative burden that includes energy-relevant indicators alongside climate, social, environmental, and economic indicators, and is flexible to the inclusion of additional data sources. We provide a summary of the sources of inputs used to develop a definition for “disadvantaged communities” that can be used to prioritize energy investments. We discuss use-cases for this index including the implementation of the Justice40 Initiative, which calls for 40 % of certain federal clean energy benefits to flow to disadvantaged communities in the United States. We use our results to examine historic allocations of federal energy investments and show that communities that we identify as disadvantaged received about 37 % fewer funds per capita than non-disadvantaged communities.
Copy Citation Popovich, N., Figueroa, A. J., Sunter, D. A., & Shah, M. (2024). Identifying disadvantaged communities in the United States: An energy-oriented mapping tool that aggregates environmental and socioeconomic burdens. Energy Research and Social Science, 109. doi:10.1016/j.erss.2023.103391 Copied to clipboard.
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Mar 1, 2024
Growth in energy justice: Exploring impacts of Residential Solar Incentive Program on rooftop solar adoption growth rates in Connecticut
By: Holt EG; Sunter DA
Solar photovoltaics (PV) offers an alternative to fossil fuels and accelerated adoption of solar PV is expected among utilities, businesses, and communities. However, not all communities are seeing these transformative opportunities. National studies have exposed disparities in rooftop solar adoption across demographic groups, with low-income, renter-occupied, and communities of color disproportionately participating less. To better understand the mechanism that led to the observed national disparities, this paper explores solar adoption growth rates across demographic variables, using Connecticut as a case study. Connecticut stands out for the state's early effort to broaden access to rooftop solar, specifically to low- and moderate-income residents, through incentive projects under their Residential Solar Investment Program (RSIP). Combining time-series data on the location of existing rooftop solar systems from Connecticut Green Bank and demographic information from the American Community Survey, rooftop solar adoption growth rates are calculated using a logarithmic growth function and compared across household income, home ownership, and racial and ethnic lines. After implementation of the RSIP, we find that participation in rooftop solar opened up to new communities and that the median observed growth rate in rooftop solar adoption doubled throughout the state. This analysis suggests the potential effect of appropriate solar policies to increase state-wide adoption while reducing economic and racial disparities in rooftop solar participation.
Copy Citation Holt, E. G., & Sunter, D. A. (2024). Growth in energy justice: Exploring impacts of Residential Solar Incentive Program on rooftop solar adoption growth rates in Connecticut. Energy Research and Social Science, 109. doi:10.1016/j.erss.2024.103410 Copied to clipboard.
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