Matthew Berman

Using U.S. Census Bureau’s 2016 Annual Survey of School System Finances, Alaska ranks 6th in per-pupil education spending, however the ranking is deceptive since it doesn’t take into account the high cost of delivering education and high cost of living in different places in Alaska. When these costs are considered, Alaska’s per-pupil spending is about average, according to Dayna DeFeo, director of ISER’s Center for Alaska Education Policy Research. 

Reproduced with permission from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

 ISER’s Matt Reimer is co-author of a new paper on fisheries management released by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 

Matthew Berman and Jennifer Schmidt, faculty members at ISER, recently completed a study titled Economic Effects of Climate Change in Alaska. Findings from that research were also included in the Alaska chapter of the recently released report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP).

The graph shows Alaska statewide annual average temperatures for 1925-2016.

Researchers at ISER's Center for Alaska Education Policy Research (CAEPR) have recently published two articles examining issues important to Alaska's teachers.

• It’s more than just dollars: Problematizing salary as the sole mechanism for recruiting and retaining teachers in rural Alaska, by Dayna DeFeo, Diane Hirshberg, and Lexi Hill. This article, published in the Alaska Native Studies Journal, argues that improving teacher retention in Alaska’s rural schools will require both adequate pay and attention to working conditions. Full text available for download.

• Statute and implementation: How phantom policies affect tenure value and support, by Dayna DeFeo, Matt Berman, and Diane Hirshberg.  This article, published in Educational Policy, discusses how teachers and principals understand, inflate, or underestimate tenure protections, and how those interpretations affect the perceived value and effectiveness of the tenure policy itself. Abstract available for download, full text available for purchase.

A recent article in the journal World Development, by Matthew Berman, professor of economics at ISER, examines how the Permanent Fund dividend (PFD) has reduced poverty among the 60,000 or so Alaska Natives living in small, isolated communities far off the road system. PFDs are cash payments the state government makes to virtually all Alaska residents every year. Rural Alaska Natives are much more likely than other Alaskans to be poor, mostly because jobs are scarce in remote areas. The author found:

Does expensive home-heating fuel cause people to move out of rural Alaska communities and into urban areas? Yes, but not as many as anecdotal reports might lead you to expect. Matthew Berman, professor of economics at ISER, found that for each $1 increase in fuel prices, fewer than 40 adults a year moved from rural to urban places. He also found that people's employment status and earnings, and local labor market conditions in general, had much more influence than high fuel prices on their decisions to leave rural places.

This is the first study to use statistical testing to assess whether high fuel prices prompt people to leave rural Alaska communities. The analysis was based on adult Permanent Fund Dividend applications for 2003 through 2015, and was funded by the Alaska Energy Authority.

Download the study, Energy Costs and Rural Alaska Out-Migration (PDF, 137.3KB), by Matthew Berman. If you have questions, get in touch with the author at matthew.berman@uaa.alaska.edu or call 907-786-5426.

The Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS) and UAA are hosting the first Anchorage Arctic Research Day on Friday, March 24, in UAA's Rasmuson Hall. The event is to provide information about the diversity of research and creative activity among Arctic researchers, and to foster new collaborations. There will be participants from government, industry, and academia, as well as not-for-profit and indigenous groups. Researchers from across the natural and social sciences, health, engineering, humanities, and arts will make presentations.

Diane Hirshberg of ISER co-organized the event with ARCUS, and she and Marie Lowe and Matthew Berman of ISER will also make presentations. Registration is free. Go to: https://www.arcus.org/meetings/2017/arctic-research-day

How might steps Alaska's state government takes to balance its budget affect Alaska families? Different ways of closing the state's $3 billion budget gap—the result of lower oil prices and dwindling oil revenues—will have different effects on households with and without children, according to a new report by Matthew Berman and Random Reamey of ISER. They looked specifically at how state income, sales, or property taxes and a cut in Permanent Fund dividends would affect incomes of households with and without children. 

Permanent Fund dividends—payments the state makes to virtually all residents annually—lifted about 25,000 Alaskans out of poverty in 2015, reducing poverty in Alaska by about a third. Since 1990, PFDs have reduced poverty rates in Alaska by an estimated 2.5 to 4 percentage points annually. They have been particularly important for children, Alaska Natives, and rural residents, who are much more likely to be poor than Alaskans on average.

Those are estimates that Matthew Berman, a professor of economics at ISER, and Random Reamey, an ISER research professional, developed for their analysis of how PFDs have reduced poverty in Alaska over the past 25 years. They made their own estimates, because they discovered that the U.S. census data federal agencies use to calculate poverty rates for Alaska don't include all PFD income. So they adjusted census data to include all PFD income, and then estimated poverty rates with and without PFDs.

Download the summary (PDF, 955KB) or the full analysis (PDF, 994KB). If you have questions, call Matthew Berman at 907-786-5426.

Are state workers better paid than their counterparts in private industry? That question is likely to come up more often, as the state deals with a huge budget shortfall. The answer is generally no, but there are exceptions for individual occupations.

That’s the main finding of ISER economists Mouhcine Guettabi and Matthew Berman, who did the research for the Alaska Department of Administration. They analyzed the question in two ways, using different data sources. Both analysts reached the same broad conclusion: state workers are not on average paid more, whether you include just wages, or total compensation—wages plus benefits.

To see highlights of the findings, download the summary, Who Has Better Pay and Benefits—Workers in State Government or Private Industry? (PDF, 759KB) For more detailed information, download the full report, Overpaid or Underpaid? Public Employee Compensation in the State of Alaska (PDF, 3.04MB). If you have questions, get in touch with Mouhcine Guettabi, assistant professor of economics, at 907-786-5496 or mguettabi@alaska.edu, or Matthew Berman, professor of economics, at 907-786-5426 or mdberman@alaska.edu.