Urban Form and Public Health
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a very nice story about UCLA’s Dick Jackson. To quote this article; “In 2001, while still at the CDC, Dr. Jackson was a co-author of an article published by Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse that contended that poorly planned built environments had adverse effects on air quality, physical activity, and public safety, among other things.”
So, my colleague is making a strong causal statement that the same person would be much healthier if he/she lived in a “new urbanist” setting rather than in the types of suburban settings that many people current live in. As an empiricist, I ask myself — how do we rigorously test this hypothesis? It is an important hypothesis to test.
There is one high quality study done by economists to examine the relationship between sprawl and obesity. These authors studied the weight dynamics for individuals who moved from center cities to suburbs. Under the Jackson hypothesis, this group should gain weight relative to observationally similar people who do not move. These authors reject that hypothesis. To really test causal claims about the role that urban form plays in determining outcomes, we need a randomized control trial. Since we choose (i.e self select) our locations , there are fundamental selection vs. treatment issues that need to be disentangled here. This is an exciting research field with opportunities for methodological advance and it is important public policy question as we think about what are the consequences of policies such as California’s SB375.
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About Matthew
Matthew E. Kahn is a Professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment, the Department of Economics, and the Department of Public Policy. He is a research associate at t…
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Matt, you forgot to mention several other papers that teased out these issues in more depth than the Puga paper.
That is: what if these fat folk found themselves self-sorted to a more supportive neighborhood? That’s right: they’d be less likely to be of an unhealthy BMI! The market would have worked had it been able to give people choices!!
Matt, you forgot to mention several other papers that teased out these issues in more depth than the Puga paper.
That is: what if these fat folk found themselves self-sorted to a more supportive neighborhood? That’s right: they’d be less likely to be of an unhealthy BMI! The market would have worked had it been able to give people choices!!
Jackson himself has written or co-authored papers that purport to disentangle these issues, including one in Science. Matt, why don’t these count as “high-quality studies”? Because they weren’t written by economists?
Jackson himself has written or co-authored papers that purport to disentangle these issues, including one in Science. Matt, why don’t these count as “high-quality studies”? Because they weren’t written by economists?