“Does Cleaning Up Contaminated Sites Yield Economic Benefits? A GIS-Econometric Analysis of the Superfund Program"
Shanti Gamper-Rabindran, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences
Abandoned hazardous sites have inflicted adverse health impacts and blighted neighborhoods. In response to public concerns, Congress enacted the Superfund program to remediate these sites. The policy debate is whether hazardous waste sites should be remediated or contained.
Our plan is to apply improved GIS and econometric methods to estimate the economic benefits from the cleanup of abandoned hazardous waste sites using sites in Pennsylvania as a pilot study. We will demonstrate a method applicable to estimating the benefits from a host of public goods in urban areas such as the provision of improved schools and public safety to the neighborhood. Therefore, this method is of use to researchers, urban planners, economists, geographers and demographers.
“Feasibility of a Web-Based Intervention to Improve Family Caregivers' Communicative Skillfulness during Patients´ Medical Visits”
Jennifer H. Lingler, PhD, CRNP
Assistant Professor
School of Nursing
Effective communication among patients with Alzheimer´s disease (AD), their family caregivers, and healthcare providers is a critical aspect of geriatric care delivery. Widely replicated research links poor patient-professional communication to a variety of negative outcomes including lower overall health status. For patients with AD, family caregivers are likely to play an important role in preventing communication breakdowns and their adverse consequences. Yet, caregivers rarely receive formal instruction in regard to the highly specialized skill of mediating communication between patients with AD and their healthcare providers. The goal of the proposed study is to translate a recently developed protocol, Promoting Alzheimer´s Caregivers´ Communicative Skillfulness (PACCS), to a web-based format and to evaluate its effectiveness for improving communication during primary care encounters of persons with dementia.
“Retirement Transition, Volunteer Engagement, and Physical Health”
Werner Troesken, PhD, Professor
Randall Walsh, PhD, Associate Professor
Department of Economics
This proposal seeks seed funding for a long-term project to study the evolution of American apartheid from 1900 through 1950. The word apartheid is used in a strict sense: to denote the evolving set of laws, covenants, and state-sanctioned violence that prohibited blacks from moving into majority white neighborhoods during the first-half of the twentieth century. The proposed analysis, therefore, focuses on the institutions that supported residential segregation not segregation, itself. The long-term project builds on two related questions. First, what were the laws and institutions that governed the housing choices of African Americans between 1900 and 1950? Second, how and why did these institutions evolve over time? A specific focus of the project is an analysis of how African Americans acquired increased housing rights despite widespread opposition from whites.