So you're doing what? Where?

One of the nice aspects of being a professor is that every seven years I am eligible to take off to some far-flung place to study something I find interesting (and which could yield future funded projects). In addition to being an interesting place to hang out for six months, Anchorage is a center of fisheries economics where I've come to study some of the unique solutions to fisheries management problems that have been developed here. I am particularly interested in the design of the processor quota system in the crab fishery (that which may be familiar from Deadliest Catch).

I'm visiting the Department of Economics at the University of Alaska-Anchorage, which has been very generous to provide me with an office. I'm working with several people here in Anchorage, including a fellow experimental economist and a fellow fisheries economist, and with a couple non-academic economists (including a former student of mine). It is an odd feature of my profession that I actually know more people in Anchorage, Alaska, than in Providence, Rhode Island.

After a week of half-days in the office (the other half day was needed at home to acquire the fine material possessions Kirsten described below), this sabbatical thing isn't half bad. In my quiet office, I've caught up on several late journal article reviews, and I've been able to spend lots of time thinking about research problems, something I can rarely do at home. I have an ambitious agenda of publishing old projects, maintaining current projects, and starting new projects, but I'm optimistic I've got a good environment to get a lot of that done!

Alright, this has been low on event content or wry humor, but I figured it'd be good to start by laying out the premise of this adventure. Then we can comment wryly on how well I'm accomplishing those objectives.

Oh yeah, and there's moose poop in the yard.