Here is a small selection of projects I have worked on spanning a wide variety of topics. My main interests are in forecasting, housing, poverty, environmental economics and trade economics.

“The Economic Impact of Invasive Species” with the Washington Department of Agriculture, 2017

I was the lead analyst for the Washington Department of Agriculture’s (WSDA) “Economic Impact of Invasive Species” report. This project was designed to help Washington legislators understand what the likely costs to Washington business’s from 23 invasive species could be if there was no funding for invasive species mitigation programs.

This was such a cool project because the final report is the product of a unique synthesis of GIS and economic impact analysis. I designed and subsequently worked with GIS analysts to build a series of shapefiles that accurately reflected the total acreages of natural resource lands (which covers farmland, rangeland, timberland and relevant waterbodies). I coordinated with WSDA invasive species experts to get GIS point data for a variety of invasive plants and animals and then worked to map them to our compiled natural resource acreage maps. This process provided an accurate representation of how the potential spread of specific invasive species could impact specific commodities.

Once we knew which commodities would be impacted by which species, I was able to translate the likely damages caused by each invasive species into jobs, wages and lost business revenue. The culmination of this process was a report and a one page legislative brief given to Washington state legislators so that they could understand the potential costs of invasive species in a condensed and easy to understand format. I calculated that invasive species could potentially cause upwards of $1.3 billion in damages which would result in over 8,000 lost jobs .

Take a look at the press release from WSDA for the report and one page legislative brief.

This project also lent itself to a system analysis approach. I re-created this report through Kumu, a fun and flexible system analysis platform. It’s a little bare-bones but is an interesting as a proof of concept to explore new ways of visualizing a complex system of economic impacts.

Check out the systems analysis map I made to visually represent the “Economic Impacts of  Invasive Species” report (hosted on my personal Kumu.io account).

“Washington State Public Ports Economic Impact and Jobs Analysis” with the Washington Public Ports Association, 2017

Public port districts are a unique public land trust in Washington. Port districts effectively act as economic development engines and have more autonomy as to how public land is used to generate public-private partnerships and encourage economic development. The Washington Public Ports Association (WPPA) desired an analysis that helped showcase how effective public port districts are as job creation engines.

As the lead analyst on this project, I had to figure out how to correctly estimate the likely employment on specific parcels of land administered by each public port district throughout Washington. To do this, I designed a a set of custom GIS shapefiles for major port districts (chiefly lands owned and leased by the Port of Seattle and the Port of Tacoma) to make a custom data request with contacts at the Puget Sound Regional Council. For all other public port districts myself and the team compiled a list of tenants on port district lands and collected business licence data (collected in part via Python) so that we could put in a secondary request for employment data based on tenant tax records with the Washington Department of Revenue.

These two methods together provided a complete picture of employment on public port district lands. With this information, I was able to generate likely business revenues for all port tenants and perform a wide ranging economic impact assessment for all public port districts. We found that Washington’s public ports directly supported an estimated 71,250 jobs in Washington and indirectly supported an additional 175,250 jobs throughout the state.

You can read the full report on the WPPA website here.

“The Economic Costs of the 2014-2015 West Coast Port Slowdown on Washington State” with the Washington Council For International Trade, 2016

The Washington Council for International Trade (WCIT) wanted to understand what the potential losses accrued by Washington business were during the longshoreman labor dispute from October 2014 through March 2015. This labor dispute affected containerized shipping throughout the West Coast, including Washington’s ports . As the lead analyst on the project I had to develop a counterfactual statistical model to estimate what likely containerized shipping value could have been had there not been any port delays in Washington.

To estimate the impact to containerized shipping, I devised a series of forecasting models, principally ARIMA and Neural Network time series forecasts, which used a truncated sample of containerized shipping data from before the labor slowdown in October 2014. The estimates these forecasts generated were then compared to actual containerized shipping data during the port slowdown. The difference between the forecasted shipping estimates and the actual shipping data provided an estimate of the losses due to just the reduction in containerized shipping.

While researching this topic, I interviewed many trade oriented business from all over Washington and learned that many firms that were especially impacted by the port slow down started to implement mitigation strategies (such as utilizing airfreight instead of containerized shipping) or were suffering further losses due to truck congestion at the port terminal (the labor slowdown meant that the volume of goods actually getting off trucks was slower than usual which created heavy traffic around the port terminals). As such it was important to estimate and integrate these potential impacts into the final estimate as well. In total we estimated that total near-term losses incurred by Washington businesses was almost $769.5 million.

You can read the report in it’s entirety on WCIT’s site here.

“Economic Analysis of Mandatory Housing Affordability” with the City of the Seattle, 2016

As part of a planning team with Community Attributes Inc., we were tasked with developing pro formas for the mandatory housing affordability (MHA) requirement under the City of Seattle’s proposed Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) legislation. The City of Seattle was looking for an economic analysis that evaluates the economic viability of new development with the zoning changes and proposed payment or performance requirements associated with MHA which would contribute 6,000 units towards the proposed 20,000 affordable housing units as stipulated in HALA.

I designed surveys for a wide variety of developers in order to gain a clear understanding of what the likely costs were to implement a variety of MHA units in different types of theoretical housing developments (e.g. backyards cottages, mixed use retail/housing etc.). I then worked to distill this information so that we had precise figures for the square foot development costs for each project type. These figures were then utilized in the resulting MHA pro forma analysis. These pro formas were used by the City of Seattle to understand if the theoretical housing project types could work under the new zoning conditions and whether the associated fees could be used to effectively build affordable housing units in Seattle.

This project was an incredibly eye opening experience for me and I learned so much about the struggles Seattle faces as it tries to be more equitable in its housing policies during a period of unprecedented economic growth for the city and the region as a whole.

Please take a look at the technical memo submitted to the City of Seattle here.

Economic Development Council of Seattle and King County Forecasting Conferences in 2016 and 2017

For the past two years, I worked with Spencer Cohen at Community Attributes Inc. to develop regional employment and population forecasts through 2020 for the Puget Sound Region (Specifically, King, Snohomish, Pierce and Kitsap Counties). The forecasts that we designed formed the basis for presentations that Chris Mefford, President and CEO of Community Attributes Inc., would give at the annual forecasting panel.

These forecasts would typically go through numerous iterations via a variety of statistical processes (such as ARIMA, Neural Network time series and Cointegrated VAR models). Naturally, these forecasts provided a range of possible growth rates for employment and population growth in the region and only a few models were represented in the final presentation.

Here is a link to the 2017 annual forecast presentation.

Here is a link to the 2016 annual forecast presentation.