Sumner La Croix
Is Leasehold Housing Built on Government Land a Solution to Unaffordable Housing in Honolulu?
Housing is expensive on Oahu. For most middle-class Honolulu households, even buying a median-priced condominium ($415,000 in February 2019) is financially out of reach. Some state lawmakers propose to remedy the situation by developing high-density leasehold condominiums on state-owned and city-owned land near rail transit stations on the Honolulu rapid transit system now under construction […]
Read MoreDo electric vehicle incentives matter? Evidence from the 50 U.S. states
UHERO congratulates Sherilyn Wee, Makena Coffman, and Sumner La Croix on the publication of, “Do electric vehicle incentives matter? Evidence from the 50 U.S. states,” in Research Policy. This research measures the effectiveness of state-level policies on the adoption of electric vehicles in the United States. Read more about this in The Role of Policy […]
Read MoreThe Role of Policy and Peers in EV Adoption
By Sherilyn Wee, Makena Coffman and Sumner LaCroix Electric vehicles (EVs) can be a cleaner means of transportation compared to cars with traditional gasoline engines. They have the added benefit of being able to provide support to the electric power grid—an increasingly important attribute in states like Hawaii with high levels of intermittent renewable energy. […]
Read MoreNew Perspectives on Honolulu’s High Housing Prices
By Sumner La Croix Single-family home prices in Honolulu soared to record highs in 2015, with the median price for the full year reaching $700,000. In the second quarter of 2015, only three U.S. cities had higher prices—San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara ($980,000), San Francisco-Oakland ($842,000), and Anaheim- Santa Ana-Irvine ($713,000)—and Honolulu’s price premium over the next […]
Read MoreUHERO Fellow Interview Series: Tim Halliday
Sumner La Croix interviewed UHERO Fellow Tim Halliday about his Social Science and Medicine paper in July 2014. For more on this paper, see Tim’s blog post here. 1. Tell us something about yourself … I earned my PhD from Princeton in 2004. I have been at UH-Mānoa since then. I am also a fellow […]
Read MoreA Cross-Country Index of Intellectual Property Rights in Pharmaceutical Innovations
Many countries with strong patent protection for other industrial products and processes have not always provided strong protection for pharmaceutical innovations. For example, in 1970, all 22 OECD countries had functioning industrial patent systems, but only four allowed new pharmaceutical products to be patented. Over the last five decades, the extent of IPR protection for […]
Read MoreThe Impact of Stronger Property Rights in Pharmaceuticals on Innovation in Developed and Developing Countries
We use dynamic panel data regressions to investigate whether the strength of a country’s patent protection for pharmaceuticals is associated with more pharmaceutical patenting by its residents and corporations in the United States. Using the Pharmaceutical Intellectual Property Protection (PIPP) Index to measure patent strength, we run dynamic probit and Poisson regressions on panels from […]
Read MoreDecline in Pacific Currencies: Crisis or More Adjustment to Come? : Pacific Beat Interview
By Sumner La Croix 1. The last few months have seen 10-20 percent declines in the exchange rates of many Pacific countries against the US dollar. The decline in the value of Indonesia’s currency has been particularly notable. Why is this happening? Each country has its own story, but the driving force behind the decline […]
Read MoreBlog: The Impact of Marriage Equality on Hawai′i’s Economy and Government: An Update After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Same-Sex Marriage Decisions
By Sumner La Croix and Lauren Gabriel The U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in the two same-sex marriage cases have substantially increased the short-term and medium-term benefits that could accrue to Hawai‘i if the Hawai‘i State Legislature enacts legislation allowing same-sex marriages to begin in Fall 2013 or early in 2014. Our updated report comes to […]
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