LAERE - EfD Seminar | Vehicles, Travel Demand, and Income: Responses to Subways and Bus Rapid Transit in Mexico City

Paulina Oliva is an Associate Professor of Economics and Spatial Sciences in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California. She specializes in the fields of environmental economics and development. In particular, she is interested in the relationship between air pollution and health and on environmental policy effectiveness in the developing world. Her work uses a variety of microeconometric techniques to study individual incentives and human impacts of air pollution. Oliva's research shows that high levels of air pollution can be especially lethal to vulnerable populations in low- and middle-income countries such as Mexico, China, India and Brazil. She also studies costs of air pollution measured in infant mortality and work hours lost. In addition to finding that effects of air pollution on infant mortality are much higher in developing countries when compared with the U.S., she has found poor air quality to be the culprit for substantial losses in worker productivity.