Borrowing from the Genki

It took me far too long to realize that Amalia's journal would be good for me, and perhaps of some interest to y'all. Being in my final year at NYU Wagner, I have a capstone project to complete to graduate. Capstone is a group project, usually as an applied project (with a client organization) but in my case it is a team research project. Meaning it is an economic research project, using multiple regression.

My team of five is interested in how public investment in infrastructure, particularly roads, and access to capital affect economic development at the state level in Brazil. With a lack of capacity in rail and ports, public investment in highway capital may prove to be similarly important in Brazil as in the U.S. As a jumping off point, we are using Teresa Garcia-Mila and Therese J. McGuire’s model in, “The Contribution of Publicly Provided Inputs to States’ Economies” (Regional Science & Urban Economics 22(1992)). Their paper examined aggregate output at the state level in the U.S. as a result of capital in structures & equipment, labor, highway capital and education.

I'll let this marinate for a while I'm sure there are already vocabulary that don't jive too well with everyday usage. My goal is to break that all down to easier to understand morsels.

Future topics will include a Brazilian background, where our topic fits in the literature of economic development, what kind of regression model we're looking at and what coefficients we want to use; the challenges we have with data, the challenges we'll have theoretically (what if there is endogeneity in our model?).

Next time you ask what I'm up to, I'll expect a spirited discussion of these issues. More practically though, we will have to complete our paper next April. So there much data to gather, regessions to run, literature to review.