By Matthew Kredell
USC Price School of Public Policy faculty, PhD students and alumni presented research at the 58th annual Western Regional Science Association annual meeting in Napa, Calif., in February.
Prof. Genevieve Giuliano took over as president of the WRSA during the conference, carrying on a long tradition of Price leadership in the association.
Founded in 1961, the WRSA is an international multidisciplinary group of university scholars and government and private-sector practitioners dedicated to the scientific analysis of regions. USC Price Profs. Marlon Boarnet and Eric Heikkila are on the association’s board, and professor emeritus Peter Gordon is a former president.
“USC has been a very visible group in the organization for a really long time,” Giuliano said. “I always encourage my students to go to this conference. With 20 minutes provided the author to talk about the paper, 10 minutes for a discussant who has read the paper in advance and another 15 minutes for questions, it’s a great way to get really good feedback on your work from peers – particularly for PhD students working on their dissertation.”
Representing USC Price at the conference were Profs. Giuliano, Heikkila, Gordon and Adam Rose, research assistant professor Jonathan Eyer, alumni Donghwan An, John Cho, Qisheng Pan, Seva Rodnyansky, Qiao Wu, and Pengyu Zhu, and PhD students Brian An, Youngeng Lu and Jung Ho Park.
“I highly recommend future IPPAM students to submit their paper to the association and attend the conference if possible,” said Wu, who presented a paper he began writing in a Price course on applied econometrics for program evaluation. “I believe they can not only learn from experts but also meet scholars from their own countries.”
Featuring four full days of research presentations, the WRSA annual meeting including participants from 10 countries.
“It’s a group of people who interact quite a bit with each other because of their geographic proximity and a tradition of liking to go to this conference, which is usually held in appealing locations,” Rose said. “There’s a full range of topics and, even though it’s the western region, there is a lot of international involvement. There were quite a lot of people from Japan, China and Korea at this last conference.”
Giuliano began a one-year term as the fourth female president in the WRSA’s nearly 60-year history. Her first duty was to give the presidential address, which she made on agglomeration economics and evolving urban form. In other words, why people are clustering in cities when technology provides less of a need for us all to be physically in one place.
“I’ve been very interested in the whole idea of our cities becoming more important or less important in today’s world,” Giuliano said. “There are arguments on both sides. I’ve done a lot of work on what we call polycentricity, the existence of many employment centers in a city. This paper looks not only at whether these centers are something we can expect to stick around but also how they work together in the metropolitan economy.”
In her first act as president, Giuliano established a committee to increase the diversity of WRSA during the course of the next year.
“We are lacking women, we are lacking minorities, and we are lacking young people in the overall membership,” Giuliano said. “We are going to be developing a set of policies to start an aggressive program of diversifying the organization.”
Distinguished Professor
Margaret and John Ferraro Chair in Effective Local Government