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COVID-19's spring 2020 school closures: The effect on teacher candidates
Dayna DeFeo and Trang Tran
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Dunleavy mandated that Alaska’s K12 schools closed to in-person instruction; later, these school closures were extended until the end of the 2019-2020 academic year. Across the state, educators worked not only to ensure they met their responsibilities for instruction, but also other key school functions including parent resources, meal services, and social-emotional learning. Concurrently, senior college students in teacher licensure programs at the University of Alaska (UA) were in classrooms fulfilling their clinical experience (student teaching) requirements. During the school closures, students were still “placed” in schools, but the nature of their internship experience changed fundamentally as classes were moved to distance delivery. On March 20, Alaska’s Education Commissioner Michael Johnson announced that the state of Alaska would grant emergency certification to teachers who were unable to complete the required number of clinical placement hours due to COVID-19 school closures. Many of these new graduates will qualify for licensure, but how will the pandemic affect them as they become teachers? In this paper, we explore how teacher candidates perceive their readiness for teaching in the fall, and their career intentions. By comparing survey responses collected from spring 2020 graduates against graduates of spring 2019 (the students who had a “typical” student teaching experience), we find that the 2020 graduating class feels ready for the classroom. However, these new teachers – and those hired from teacher education programs (TEPs) outside of Alaska – will need supports as they transition to teaching.
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COVID-19 Survey in the Municipality of Anchorage, June 16-18: Highlights
Gabriel Garcia, Joy Mapaye, Rebecca Wyck, Katie Cueva, Elizabeth Snyder, Jennifer Meyer, Jenny Miller, and Thomas Hennessy
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Needs Assessment Related to COVID-19 with Special Populations: Brief Report
Gabriel Garcia, Joy Mapaye, Rebecca Wyck, Katie Cueva, Elizabeth Snyder, Jennifer Meyer, Jenny Miller, and Thomas Hennessy
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Second COVID-19 Panel Survey in the Municipality of Anchorage: Highlights
Gabriel Garcia, Joy Mapaye, Rebecca Wyck, Katie Cueva, Elizabeth Snyder, Jennifer Meyer, Jenny Miller, and Thomas Hennessy
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Alaska’s economy and the COVID-19 virus
Mouhcine Guettabi
The Alaska economy, similar to the rest of the world, will contract over the next few weeks and months due to the COVID-19 virus that has forced businesses to close or significantly curtail operations. While it is near impossible to identify the true economic consequences of these measures, we make educated assumptions about the size of the layoffs in the most vulnerable sectors. To get the full scale of the potential losses, we estimate multiplier effects from these losses using an input output model. Layoffs in the directly affected sector could exceed 27,000 with a payroll of almost 80 million dollars in the month of April. The indirect and induced effects of this shock could result in another 21,000 jobs lost if the employment separations are not temporary. In the second quarter of 2020, direct GDP losses due to the decline in economic activity -not including declines in oil prices- could amount to almost 2 billion dollars. If the disruption in economic activity is not short-lived, we could expect another 2 billion dollars in losses due to the indirect and induced effects. The significant Federal aid package which will provide a boost to unemployment insurance, direct transfers to households, and aid to businesses will certainly dampen some of the consequences we estimate. While the short term costs of social distancing are high, Alaska’s long term economic health depends on first containing the virus.
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Alaska's economy and the pandemic
Mouhcine Guettabi
The Alaska economy has emerged from its longest recession in 2019. The decline in economic activity and government revenues was due to the severe decline in oil prices which resulted in deep spending cuts and significant private sector job losses. The current pandemic has resulted in a significant shock to all facets of the Alaska economy. In this paper, we provide a little bit of background on the Alaska economy, present new high frequency data to asses the extent of the current damage, and then present a forecast for the next 6, 12, and 18 months. In 2020, we anticipate the economy to end the year with almost 25,000 fewer jobs than in 2019. The decrease would represent a 7.4% relative to the previous year. In 2021, we expect the economy to slowly start regaining the jobs lost the previous year and grow at a rate of 2.2%. In 2022, we anticipate a continuing climb for the economy as it is expected to grow at 1.1% percent. By the end of 2022, the Alaska economy should be at about 95% of the pre-pandemic levels. It is important to note there are significant downside risks which could negatively influence the employment outlook.
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COVID-19 Panel Survey in the Municipality of Anchorage: Highlights
Thomas Hennessy, Gabriel Garcia, Joy Mapaye, Rebecca Wyck, Elizabeth Snyder, Jennifer Meyer, Jenny Miller, and Katie Cueva
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Air and Water Violations in Alaska 2011-2019
Bob Loefflor
Alaskans care about their environment. Whenever we discuss development and conservation proposals, there is always a discussion about whether our water and air are being protected and whether some industries have a good record protecting our air and water. Or not.
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K-12 Education Recommendations for Municipality of Anchorage
Elizabeth Snyder, Micah Hahn, Lauren Lessard, Katie Cueva, Lisa Llewellyn Schwarzburg, Laura Grage, Rebecca Wyck, and Thomas Hennessy
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Adaptation to climate change in coastal communities: findings from seven sites on four continents
Matthew Berman and Gary Kofinas
Climate change is causing wide-ranging effects on ecosystem services critical to coastal communities and livelihoods, creating an urgent need to adapt. Most studies of climate change adaptation consist of narrative descriptions of individual cases or global synthesis, making it difficult to formulate and test locally rooted but generalizable hypotheses about adaptation processes. In contrast, researchers in this study analyzed key points in climate change adaptation derived from coordinated fieldwork in seven coastal communities around the world, including Arctic, temperate, and tropical areas on four continents. Study communities faced multiple challenges from sea level rise and warmer ocean temperatures, including coastal erosion, increasing salinity, and ecological changes. We analyzed how the communities adapted to climate effects and other co-occurring forces for change, focusing on most important changes to local livelihoods and societies, and barriers to and enablers of adaptation. Although many factors contributed to adaptation, communities with strong self-organized local institutions appeared better able to adapt without substantial loss of well-being than communities where these institutions were weak or absent. Key features of these institutions included setting and enforcing rules locally and communication across scales. Self-governing local institutions have been associated with sustainable management of natural resources. In our study communities, analogous institutions played a similar role to moderate adverse effects from climate-driven environmental change. The findings suggest that policies to strengthen, recognize, and accommodate local institutions could improve adaptation outcomes.
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Universal Cash Transfers and Labor Market Outcomes
Andrew Bibler, Mouhcine Guettabi, and Matthew Reimer
One major criticism of universal basic income is that unconditional cash transfers discourage recipients from working. We estimate the causal effects of a universal cash transfer on short-run labor market activity by exploiting the timing and variation of a long-running unconditional and universal transfer: Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend. We find evidence of both a positive labor demand and negative labor supply response to the transfers, document important heterogeneity across workers, and provide a set of placebo tests supporting our main results. Altogether, a $1,000 increase in the per-person disbursement leads to a 0.2% labor market contraction on an annual basis.
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How much does Alaska spend on K-12 education?
Dayna Jean DeFeo, Matthew Berman, Alexandra Hill, and Diane Hirshberg
Education funding in Alaska, as in most states, is one of the largest allocations in the state operating budget. In 2017, Alaska’s K-12 per-pupil spending was $17,838, which is 46% higher than the national average. However, a lot of things in Alaska are expensive relative to national averages: healthcare, food, and energy, to name just a few. In this paper we adjusted Alaska’s data from the US Census Bureau 2017 Annual Survey of School System Finances to state and national cost indices, and find that Alaska’s per-pupil expenditures are on par with national averages. As many drivers of Alaska’s education costs extend beyond education policy, we caution against cuts that leave districts with few choices but to diminish the teacher workforce by eliminating positions or hiring lower quality teachers with less competitive salaries.
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A simple decomposition of Alaska's labor force participation rate
Mouhcine Guettabi
In Alaska, similar to the rest of the country, the share of people working or seeking employment started declining in the early 2000's. The implications for lower labor force participation rates are numerous and have consequences on the tax base, government revenues, and economic growth. From 2000 to 2010, we find Alaska's labor force declined from 73.5 to 69.6% with more than 90% of the decline attributed to demographic shifts. From 2010 to 2018, the labor force participate rate went from 69.6 to 65% but the reasons for the decline were due to both behavioral adjustments (44.6%) and demographic shifts (55.3%). Lastly, we show that using the unemployment rate as a metric of the economy's health during times of significant labor force change can be misleading.
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What do we know about the effects of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend?
Mouhcine Guettabi
The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) has been distributed to Alaska residents for 37 years, providing each resident an equal share of a yearly government appropriation based on the earnings of the Alaska Permanent Fund. While support for the program is high, work assessing the PFD’s influence on the lives of Alaskans is limited. Recently, a number of researchers have analyzed the causal effect of the PFD on a variety of socio-economic outcomes including employment, consumption, income inequality, health, and crime. This paper summarizes this empirical literature and highlights future areas of research.
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Economic Impacts of the Vetoes on the Alaska Economy
Mouhcine Guettabi and Nolan Klouda
On June 28, 2019 Governor Mike Dunleavy announced line-item vetoes totaling $409 million from the State of Alaska budget for Fiscal Year 2020. These vetoes include significant cuts to the University of Alaska, Medicaid, payments to local governments, public assistance programs, state personnel headcounts, and numerous other categories. The full consequences of these cuts on the state economy, fiscal health, population, and policy outcomes will take years to develop. In this paper, we provide the short term impacts of the cuts, how they interact with the current state of the economy, and a descriptive outlook of the some of the future effects. We find the cuts will result in more than 4,000 jobs lost in the short run and will therefore return the Alaska economy into recession. While the short term losses represent a considerable negative shock to the economy, the consequences of these cuts on long term development could be even more pronounced.
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Economic Impacts of the Vetoes on the Alaska Economy
Mouhcine Guettabi and Nolan Klouda
On June 28, 2019 Governor Mike Dunleavy announced line-item vetoes totaling $409 million from the State of Alaska budget for Fiscal Year 2020. These vetoes include significant cuts to the University of Alaska, Medicaid, payments to local governments, public assistance programs, state personnel headcounts, and numerous other categories. The full consequences of these cuts on the state economy, fiscal health, population, and policy outcomes will take years to develop. In this paper, we provide the short term impacts of the cuts, how they interact with the current state of the economy, and a descriptive outlook of the some of the future effects. We find the cuts will result in more than 4,000 jobs lost in the short run and will therefore return the Alaska economy into recession. While the short term losses represent a considerable negative shock to the economy, the consequences of these cuts on long term development could be even more pronounced.
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FASD Costs: Evidence from Hawaii Medicaid Data
Bridget Hanson, Rebecca Porter, and Mouhcine Guettabi
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs), a collection of permanent yet preventable developmental disabilities and birth defects resulting from prenatal alcohol exposure, are associated with substantial costs. We use information from Hawaii Medicaid data for individuals who have at least one FASD-related condition. The total spending for these individuals between 2011 and 2015 was $460,515,584. Of that total, more than $32 million is directly associated with FASD-related visits/codes. We find that the average FASD-related visit costs $121, which is more expensive than the average medicaid visit. We also find that the frequency of FASD-related visits increases with age. We find evidence that the number of initial conditions is positively associated with the number of visits and accumulated medical costs and that 20% of the patients are responsible for 85.85% of the total spending. This paper was supported by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Cooperative Agreement 5NU01DD001143.
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Hitchhikers on floats to Arctic freshwater: Private aviation and recreation loss from aquatic invasion
Tobias Schwoerer, Joseph Little, Jennifer Schmidt, and Kyle Borash
This study of aviation-related recreation loss shows that a survey primarily aimed at collecting information on invasive species’ pathways can also be used to estimate changes in pathway-related ecosystem services. We present a case study for Elodea spp. (elodea), Alaska’s first known aquatic invasive plant, by combining respondents’ stated pre-invasion actual flights with stated post-invasion contingent behavior, plane operating costs, and site quality data. We asked pilots about the extent of continued flights should destinations become invaded and inhibit flight safety. We estimate a recreation demand model where the lost trip value to the average floatplane pilot whose destination is an elodea-invaded lake is US$185 (95 % CI $157, $211). Estimates of ecosystem damages incurred by private actors responsible for transmitting invaders can nudge actors to change behavior and inform adaptive ecosystem management. The policy and modeling implications of quantifying such damages and integration into more complex models are discussed.
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Alaska High School Graduation Rate Trends
Trang Tran and Alexandra Hill
This paper examines trends in Alaska public high school graduation rates from academic year 2010-11 to 2015-16 and explores differences across demographic groups. We focus specifically on students from public neighborhood high schools. These are publicly-funded schools run by district or Regional Educational Attendance Area school boards serving all residents within school attendance boundaries. These schools represent about 88% of Alaska’s high school students.
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Universal Cash and Crime
Brett Watson, Matthew Reimer, and Mouhcine Guettabi
We estimate the effects of universal cash transfers on crime from Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, an annual lump-sum payment to all Alaska residents. We find a 14% increase in substance-abuse incidents the day after the payment and a 10% increase over the following four weeks. This is partially offset by a 8% decrease in property crime, with no changes in violent crimes. On an annual basis, however, changes in criminal activity from the payment are small. Estimated costs comprise a very small portion of the total payment, suggesting that crime-related concerns of a universal cash transfer program may be unwarranted.
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Universal Cash Transfers Reduce Childhood Obesity Rates
Brett Watson, Matthew Reimer, and Mouhcine Guettabi
We evaluate the impact of universal income on childhood obesity. While the goals of implementing universal income are many, its influence on childhood obesity is of particular interest given the growing obesity epidemic and its future threat to global public health. We use evidence from Alaska’s universal income program, the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), which has provided annual, unconditional, and universal income to Alaskan residents for over thirty-five years. We use both survey and administrative data to evaluate how the availability of unconditional resources at an early developmental stage, in terms of PFD payments to the child, affects a child’s body mass index (BMI). Using date-of-birth eligibility cut-offs as an identification strategy, we find that an additional one thousand dollars in PFD payments decreases the probability of an Alaskan child being obese by as much as 4.5 percentage points. Back-of-the-envelope calculations for Alaska suggest these reduction may avert 500 cases of obesity and achieve medical cost savings of $2-10 million per year. These findings highlight just one of the potential social benefits of universal income and the potential it has as a tool for addressing the obesity epidemic.
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