Here's a frequent conversation overhead when I meet new people...
'What do you do?' Oh crap, here we go.
'I'm a professor at OSU.' Not wanting to get into too many boring details.
'Oh really, what do you teach?' Y'know, because professors only teach.
'Economics.' The glazed look--John knows what I'm talking about.
'Oh so you're in the business school?' Because economics and business are the same thing.
'Not exactly. I'm an environmental economist. I'm in the College of Agriculture.' Actually it's the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, but to most people it's just Ag--cows and plows--West Campus--the other side of the river.
'So what do you do all summer?' D'oh. I spend my summer trying to figure out a better way to handle this conversation.
'I have a 50% teaching and 50% research position, so I spent a lot of the summer on my research.'
'You mean you have to like write stuff and publish it." Like totally.
'Yep.'
'So what kind of research do you do?'
'Most of my work is about placing dollar values on environmental amenities.'
'Oh really, like what?' Now, I used to use the Exxon Valdez as my standard example even though I had nothing to do with it. But now I can say...
When buying a house near the shore, do people pay more for environmental amenities such as water clarity and quality? Residents living around Lake Erie do, according to researchers in Ohio.
[...]
[Elena] Irwin and fellow university researcher Tim Haab hope the answers to their broad research question will help coastal resource managers better balance environmental economics with ecology.
[...]
The researchers found that both water clarity and quality correlated with increased property values, but "water clarity seems to have the biggest bang for the buck in terms of housing price," Irwin says.
"If you increased the depth of water clarity by two meters, it was found to increase the average housing value by $4,300," she explains. This is an increase of between four and five percent of the average home value in the study region.
'Oh,' glazed look, 'I need a drink.'
