In the last three years, Lahiri has attained widespread recognition for his work on economic forecasting, especially in the field of transportation. Together with Vincent Yao, he developed a Transportation Services Index (TSI) that has been adopted by the US Department of Transportation to gauge the industry in relation to the economy. Since March, 2004, DOT’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics has released monthly estimates of the index, which measures the latest output in the for-hire transportation sector. The TSI has additional value as a leading indicator of the performance of the economy. Since the service-providing sectors such as transportation have become increasingly more important in the economy than the manufacturing sectors, and none of the current coincident indicators used by NBER to define business cycles represents services, the TSI fills in the enormous gap in monitoring where the economy is headed.
In addition to forecasting, Lahiri is interested in the economics of health and disability; and he is a participant in the research activities of the EXPORT Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities. Together with Richard Alba, he has co-directed a pilot project intended to develop measures of minority-majority health disparities. Lahiri’s research has involved the CDC-mandated Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey data, and he has focused on applying sophisticated econometric procedures to the four points from the standard self-assessed health question in order to estimate individual health and aggregate health inequality. The result of this work is a measure that can be more validly compared across population groups than can the four-point measure itself. Results from this project have been presented at the conference “The Decade of Health Disparity Reduction: Towards Evidence-Based Models” (March 10-11, 2006) in Columbia University, and also at NIH conference “Understanding and Reducing Health Disparities” (October 23-24, 2006).
Currently, Lahiri is writing additional research papers with his colleagues at the Office of Policy of the Social Security Administration on the recent growth of disability insurance programs using matched SIPP and SSA administrative records. The roles of such factors as disability benefit, screening stringency, regional unemployment, spousal support, etc., in inducing disability applications are under study. He was invited to present his recent work on disability at the conference “The Use of Econometrics in Informing Public Policy Makers” (April 22-23, 2006) held at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
Lahiri is planning to apply for research grants to study different aspects of disability program including optimal forecasts for disability applications at state levels.
Dr. Lahiri was recently a co-organizer of the CSDA colloquium series; and he thereby helped to increase the number and relevance of presentations by economists.
Dr. Lahiri has made use of the computing infrastructure and draws upon the Administrative Core for management of the EXPORT Center pilot project grant; his student, Zulkarnain Pulungan, is in residence at CSDA.