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Research Assistants

Measuring Changes in Value of Local Outdoor Recreation

This project investigates changes in the aggregate welfare and marginal value that local outdoor recreation provides to Americans. It also estimates a quantity of outdoor recreational trips. The value of local outdoor recreation at a national level is unknown and understudied, considering that most outdoor trips are likely local. Estimating this value will assist in populating novel natural capital accounts that are called for in the National Strategy for Environmental Statistics.

An RA would help with three possible tasks:

  1. Contributing to the development and testing of an R package that uses BLS-Census data to measure travel costs.
  2. Help develop and build a simulation method to test methods for calculating welfare based on BLS-Census data.
  3. Contribute to data analysis to determine how much current methods underestimate the contribution of local recreation.

Requisite Skills and Qualifications

We are looking for an RA who:

  1. Is experienced with data management and analysis in R and possibly also python.
  2. Has an understanding of welfare economics.
  3. Has some experience with econometrics or statistics.
  4. Is capable of working independently with weekly touch-point meetings with the team.