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Climate Change Takes Center Stage in Economics

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With climate change affecting everything from household finances to electric grids, the profession is increasingly focused on how society can mitigate carbon emissions and cope with their impact.A major economics conference this month included papers on wind turbine manufacturing, wildfire smoke and the stability of electricity grids.From left: Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times; Earl Wilson/The New York Times; Zack Wittman for The New York TimesIn early January in San Antonio, dozens of Ph.D. economists packed into a small windowless room in the recesses of a Grand Hyatt to hear brand-new research on the hottest topic of their annual conference: how climate change is affecting everything.The papers in this session focused on the impact of natural disasters on mortgage risk, railway safety and even payday loans. Some attendees had to stand in the back, as the seats had already been filled. It wasn’t an anomaly.Nearly every block of time at the Allied Social Science Associations conference — a gathering of dozens of economics-adjacent academic organizations recognized by the American Economic Association — had multiple climate-related presentations to choose from, and most appeared similarly popular.For those who have long focused on environmental issues, the proliferation of climate-related papers was a welcome development. “It’s so nice to not be the crazy people in the room with the last session,” said Avis Devine, an associate professor of real estate finance and sustainability at York University in Toronto, emerging after a lively discussion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    The Mystery of the Coin That Shouldn’t Exist

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    Scientists recently analyzed a Peruvian 10-cent piece with an unexplained origin.A decade ago, a funny money mystery fell into the hands of scientists and students at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima.The university had been acquiring 19th- and 20th-century Peruvian coins from local dealers, and graduate students in the chemistry department were analyzing the pieces for their thesis work. But one coin, a 10-cent piece known as a dinero, stood out.The dinero was marked “1899.” The problem was that official records indicated no coins of that denomination were minted in Peru that year — according to the people who made the money, the coin never existed.Most international coin catalogs don’t list 1899 dineros, said Luis Ortega, a chemist at the university. And in the rare cases that they do, there is often only a note of “counterfeit” with no further detail, Dr. Ortega said. “No one was able to provide more information about it.”Now Dr. Ortega and Fabiola Bravo Hualpa, a doctoral student, believe they have shed new light on the mystery of the coin that came from nowhere. In a paper published last year in the journal Heritage Science, they described how they subjected one of the two known 1899 dineros to a barrage of scientific analyses, illuminating its possible origins and the role it might have played during an unstable era of South American history.To the naked eye, the 1899 coin resembles other dineros: It’s silver in color and features the same coat of arms and seated woman that represents the goddess of liberty. And it’s remarkably similar in size to other dineros minted around the turn of the 20th century — about the dimensions of a U.S. dime.But when Dr. Ortega and Ms. Bravo Hualpa bombarded the 1899 coin with X-rays and measured the light it re-emitted, they determined that the dinero was largely made of copper, zinc and nickel. This alloy is known as nickel silver. It’s commonly used to make silverware and ornamental objects and has a silvery appearance, but it contains no silver. Genuine dineros produced by the Lima Mint, on the other hand, are roughly 90 percent silver.Dr. Ortega and Ms. Bravo Hualpa also found that the 1899 dinero contained traces of iron, cobalt and lead. Those impurities imply that the coin was counterfeited long ago, not more recently, the researchers suggest. Such contaminants are characteristic of older alloys because of limitations in technology at the time. “The refining methods were not as good as they are now,” Dr. Ortega said.The presence of impurities, paired with the coin’s worn faces, suggests that it was produced in the 19th or 20th centuries, the researchers concluded. But given that nickel silver wasn’t widely used for coins or tokens in Peru at that time, it’s likely that this coin was created abroad, the researchers suggest. Its producer might have therefore been wholly unaware that no dineros were officially minted in 1899.“The counterfeiter probably didn’t realize that that coin didn’t exist,” Dr. Ortega said.He said that an influx of low-value coinage would have been welcomed in Peru at the dawn of the 20th century. The country’s economy was reeling from the recent War of the Pacific, and the government was focusing on printing larger-denomination paper bank notes to pay off international loans; in 1899, the Lima Mint produced roughly one-tenth the number of silver coins it produced just five years earlier.As a result, people in Peru were using coins from neighboring nations or even cutting their own country’s coins in half to conduct small transactions. “Counterfeiters found a field of opportunity,” Dr. Ortega said.Dineros were low-denomination coins used by everyday people. Studying this coin, and the economic and political situation that prompted its creation, can therefore be illuminating. “If you want to study our society, you don’t want to look at a Ferrari,” said Laura Perucchetti, an archaeometallurgist at the British Museum in London, not involved in the research. “You want to look at a Volkswagen or a Ford.”Dr. Ortega is not finished studying counterfeit coins and their historical context. He plans to meet with a collector based in Lima who amassed an assortment of coins ostensibly minted from the 1830s through the 1960s. Another 1899 dinero has already surfaced in that collection, and he is on the lookout for more.“There must be a few around,” Dr. Ortega said. More

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    New York Plans to Invest $1 Billion to Expand Chip Research

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    The move is aimed at drawing $9 billion in corporate investment, as New York jockeys to host a new national semiconductor technology center.Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York announced on Monday a plan to invest $1 billion to expand chip research activities in Albany, N.Y., as the state aims to continue as a global semiconductor center.The plan is expected to create 700 new permanent jobs and retain thousands more, and includes the purchase of a new version of one of the world’s most expensive and sophisticated manufacturing machines, along with the construction of a new building to house it.At an event in Albany, Gov. Hochul positioned the investment as a national priority. “The Chinese are attempting to dominate this industry,” she said. “We have no intention of letting that happen. “The initiative should draw $9 billion in additional investments from chip-related companies, according to state officials. They expect it to boost New York’s chances to be selected to host a new National Semiconductor Technology Center, a planned centerpiece of the research portion of federal money that Congress allocated in 2022 as part of the CHIPS Act.“We’re hoping that this level of investment will attract more investment from the U.S. CHIPS Act to make it even bigger,” said Mukesh Khare, an IBM vice president who is general manager of its semiconductor operations.Besides IBM, which has long conducted chip research in Albany, companies participating in the project include Micron Technology, Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron.The focus of the effort is the Albany Nanotech Complex, a cluster of research buildings owned and operated by a state-affiliated nonprofit called NY CREATES. The state plans to spend about $500 million to build a new 50,000-square-foot clean room building.A different building is needed to accommodate the next major advance in a technology called lithography, which projects patterns of circuitry on silicon wafers to make chips. Advances in such equipment are needed to create smaller transistors and other circuitry to boost the power of computers and other devices.The most sophisticated chips are currently made using technology called extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, lithography. The Dutch company ASML is the dominant supplier of the machines, which officials in the United States and the Netherlands have prevented from being sold to China as part of an effort to limit that country’s progress in chip manufacturing.Albany Nanotech has owned prototype EUV tools and currently operates a commercial version. Under the new plan, New York will invest $500 million to purchase a next-generation EUV system — known by the phrase “High NA,” for numerical aperture — that will allow the center to develop much more advanced chips.Besides permanent research jobs, state officials estimated that the Albany project would generate 500 to 600 temporary construction jobs over roughly two years.Albany NanoTech won’t be the first to use the High NA tool. Intel has ordered the first system from ASML, which is expected to begin installing it in early 2024. The comparable machine is expected to arrive in Albany in late 2025, Mr. Khare said.The effort is unusual in several ways, including that the new machine will be owned by the state and operated as a public resource to help the broader U.S. semiconductor industry, he added.States in the Northeast United States seem destined to play a big role in the chip industry’s evolution. U.S. Commerce Department officials also said Monday that BAE Systems in New Hampshire will receive the first grant under the manufacturing portion of the CHIPS Act.Micron, a Boise, Idaho, company that is the only American maker of chips used to store data, has also said it will spend up to $100 billion over a decade or more to develop a new manufacturing site near Syracuse, N.Y. More

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    Defense Department Awards Chip Funding to Fuel Domestic Research

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    The $238 million in grants will set up eight research hubs, as a small slice of the federal money that will go to chip companies and research facilities in the coming months.The Biden administration on Wednesday announced that it was awarding $238 million through the Defense Department to set up eight hubs around the United States for promoting innovation in the semiconductor industry.The funds are one of the earliest releases of the nearly $53 billion in grants and subsidies that Congress and the Biden administration have approved to build up the domestic semiconductor industry, which U.S. officials say has been left vulnerable by decades of offshoring.The Biden administration has a variety of funding programs in the works to encourage chip research institutions and manufacturers to set up operations in the United States. Most of these programs are run through the Commerce Department, and many will begin handing out money this fall.While U.S. companies still design many of the world’s most advanced chips, much of the manufacturing of the technology has been outsourced to foreign locations, including Taiwan, leaving U.S. chip supply vulnerable if, for example, the Chinese government were to invade Taiwan.The awards announced Wednesday will go to research institutes, consortiums and universities located in New York, Arizona, Indiana, Ohio, California, North Carolina and Massachusetts, defense officials said.Each hub will receive $15 million to $40 million to fund the development of new chips for use in electromagnetic warfare, artificial intelligence, 5G and 6G wireless technologies, and quantum computing, among other areas. While the research will be directed at meeting the needs of the Defense Department, it is also expected to be useful for commercial applications.Kathleen Hicks, the deputy defense secretary, said in a news conference Wednesday that the hubs would “tackle many technical challenges relevant to D.O.D.’s missions, to get the most cutting-edge microchips into systems our troops use every day: ships, planes, tanks, long-range munitions, communications gear, sensors and much more.”The funding also aims to accelerate what the industry refers to as the “lab-to-fab transition,” the process of taking new chip technologies and turning them into viable commercial products.David A. Honey, the deputy under secretary of defense for research and engineering, said the hubs would bring more prototype work to the United States.“Now we’ll be able to get it done here,” he said. “And also we’re building out in the areas that are just not available anywhere else.”The Commerce Department is separately setting up a string of research hubs for the semiconductor industry, collectively called the National Semiconductor Technology Center, drawing on $11 billion in funding it received for research and development.Appearing before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee on Tuesday, Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, said that her department was on track to formally unveil that technology center this fall.She also said that the department had received about 100 applications from companies hoping to receive grants that will be available to manufacturers.While Ms. Raimondo acknowledged that the grant program faced challenges, like securing enough workers to staff new chip plants, she said that if properly implemented, the program would make the United States “the premier destination in the world” for chip design, research and manufacturing.“That’s the vision that we’re trying to achieve with your support,” Ms. Raimondo told lawmakers.Ms. Raimondo was also questioned about the release in prior weeks of an advanced smartphone by Chinese telecom giant Huawei. The company is under heavy U.S. trade restrictions, administered by the Commerce Department, that theoretically should have prevented such an innovation.Ms. Raimondo said that she was upset by the development, but added that the U.S. government did not have any evidence that Chinese companies could manufacture the more sophisticated chips at scale.Ms. Raimondo said that the United States could take various defensive measures to limit China’s access to advanced technology, but “my strongly held view is that what we do on offense matters so much more.”“The reality is that over the past 30 years, this country has taken its eye off the ball of manufacturing,” she continued. “And when you don’t manufacture you lose out on innovation, and you become dependent on other countries.” More

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    Indiana Tests if the Heartland Can Transform Into a Chip Hub

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    Over the past 14 months, Indiana began converting 10,000 acres of corn and bean fields into an innovation park. State leaders met with the chief executives of semiconductor giants in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. And they hosted top Biden administration officials to show off a $100 million expansion of chip research and development facilities at a local university.The actions were driven by one main goal: to turn Indiana into a microchip manufacturing and research hub, almost from scratch.“We’ve never done anything at this scale,” said Brad Chambers, who was Indiana’s commerce secretary in charge of economic development. “It’s a multibillion-dollar commitment by the state to be ready for the transitions that are happening in our global economy.”“We’ve never done anything at this scale,” said Brad Chambers, Indiana’s commerce secretary.Kaiti Sullivan for The New York TimesIndiana’s moves are a test of the Biden administration’s efforts to stimulate regional economies through the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act, a landmark package of funding that is planned to begin going out the door in the next few months. The program is intended to bolster domestic manufacturing and research of semiconductors, which act as the brains of computers and other products and have become central to the U.S. battle with China for tech primacy.The Biden administration has promised that the CHIPS Act will seed high-paying tech jobs and start-ups even in places with little foundation in the tech industry. In a speech in May last year, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who oversees the chips program, said she was looking at how the program would help “different places in the heartland of America.”She added, “I think we will really unleash an unbelievable torrent of entrepreneurship and capital opportunity.”Gina Raimondo, the U.S. secretary of commerce, is overseeing the CHIPS Act program. Jared Soares for The New York TimesThat makes Indiana a prime case study for whether the administration’s efforts will pan out. Unlike Arizona and Texas, which have long had chip-making plants, Indiana has little experience with the complicated manufacturing processes underlying the components, beyond electric vehicle battery manufacturing and some defense technology projects that involve semiconductors.Indiana now wants to catch up to other places that have landed big chip manufacturing plants. The push is supported by Senator Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana, who was a co-author on the CHIPS Act and has been a leading voice on increasing funds for tech hubs. Companies and universities in Indiana have applied for multiple CHIPS Act grants, with the aim of winning awards not only for chip manufacturing but also for research and development.Some economists said the Biden administration’s goals of turning farmland into advanced chip factories might be overly ambitious. It took decades for Silicon Valley and the Boston tech corridor to thrive. Those regions succeeded because of their strong academic research universities, big anchor companies, skilled workers and investors.Many other areas don’t have that combination of assets. Indiana has for decades faced a brain drain among some of its more educated young people who flock to larger cities for work, according to the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. Some industrial policy proponents see the investments as a way to reverse that exodus, as well as a broader trend toward deindustrialization that hollowed out communities in the Rust Belt.But it’s unclear whether the program can achieve such ambitious goals — or whether the Biden administration will judge it to be more effective to spread out investments around the country or concentrate them in a few key hubs.“Many pieces have to come together,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He added that the federal government’s plan to initially put $500 million into tech hubs was too small and estimated it would take $100 billion in government aid to create 10 sustainable tech hubs.Indiana does have some advantages. The state has ample land and water — which are necessary for large chip factories that use water to cool equipment and rinse silicon wafers — and it has relatively stable weather for the highly sensitive production process. It also has Purdue University, with an engineering school that has promised to turn out the technicians and researchers needed for chip production.Yet the state faces stiff competition. In January 2022, Indiana lost a bidding war to Ohio over plans by Intel, the big U.S. chip-maker, to build two factories valued at $20 billion.“We learned a lot of lessons,” Mr. Chambers said about the failure. The biggest, he said, was to have a more attractive package of land, infrastructure and work force programs ready to offer big chip companies.A year later, Indiana won a $1.8 billion investment from SkyWater, a Minneapolis-based chip-maker, to build a factory with 750 jobs adjacent to Purdue’s campus.SkyWater, a Minneapolis-based chip maker, plans to invest $1.8 billion in a factory in Indiana. SkyWaterIndiana beat out four other states vying for SkyWater’s chip facility.SkyWaterState leaders acknowledge that any tech transformation could take years, especially if there is no anchor plant by even larger chip manufacturers such as TSMC, the world’s biggest maker of cutting-edge chips.Mr. Young said he and other state leaders were in talks with big chip makers for a contract that would compare to the $20 billion that Intel committed to Ohio. But “all net new job creation in my lifetime has been created by new firms and young firms,” he said.Indiana’s chip-making metamorphosis is now centered on a tech park, LEAP Innovation District, in the town of Lebanon near Interstate 65, which connects Indianapolis and Purdue in West Lafayette. The town is surrounded by 15,000 square miles of corn and bean farms.The park began taking shape along with the CHIPS Act. In 2019, Mr. Young was a co-author of the Endless Frontier Act with Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York and then the Senate minority leader. The bill was the precursor to the CHIPS Act.As the bill wound through Congress, Mr. Young was in regular contact with Eric Holcomb, Indiana’s governor, and Mitch Daniels, then Purdue’s president, on details of the proposal. Mr. Young said Indiana’s manufacturing roots would be its asset, if the state’s factory sector could transition to making advanced chips.“I realized that Indiana and, more broadly, the heartland stood to disproportionately benefit from the investments that we would be making,” he said in an interview last month.Mr. Holcomb and Mr. Chambers then created a plan for a tech manufacturing park. Within months, they began buying corn and bean farms in Lebanon for what became the LEAP Innovation District.In September, Ms. Raimondo and Secretary of State Antony Blinken toured Purdue University’s clean rooms, seen here, for chip research.Kaiti Sullivan for The New York TimesPurdue is also working on a $100 million expansion of semiconductor research and development.Kaiti Sullivan for The New York TimesIn May 2022, Mr. Holcomb unveiled LEAP and began installing new water and power lines and a new road there. Mr. Holcomb, Mr. Chambers and Mr. Young also traveled to more than a dozen countries to meet with the executives of chip companies like SK Hynix and TSMC. They offered cheap rent in the LEAP district, tax incentives, access to labs and researchers at Purdue, and training programs at the local Ivy Tech Community College.Some of the work paid off. When Indiana beat out four other states for SkyWater’s $1.8 billion chip facility, the company said it was impressed by the coordination between state leaders and Purdue’s new president, Mung Chiang, who launched the nation’s first semiconductor degree programs to nurture workers for chip makers.Mung Chiang, Purdue University’s president, has rolled out a semiconductor degree program to nurture chip workers. Kaiti Sullivan for The New York TimesIn September, Mr. Chiang invited Ms. Raimondo and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken to tour Purdue’s clean rooms for chip research and to see plans for a $100 million expansion of semiconductor research and development, including 50 new faculty to work on advanced chip science.“I think you have all the ingredients,” Ms. Raimondo said in a discussion with Mr. Holcomb and Mr. Chiang during the visit. Indiana officials now await word on how much CHIPS Act funding they may get. Some early results from the LEAP district initiative offer a mixed picture of where things might go.In May 2022, the park landed its first tenant — Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company, not a chip maker. More

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    Heat Is Costing the U.S. Economy Billions in Lost Productivity

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    From meatpackers to home health aides, workers are struggling in sweltering temperatures and productivity is taking a hit.As much of the United States swelters under record heat, Amazon drivers and warehouse workers have gone on strike in part to protest working conditions that can exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.On triple-digit days in Orlando, utility crews are postponing checks for gas leaks, since digging outdoors dressed in heavy safety gear could endanger their lives. Even in Michigan, on the nation’s northern border, construction crews are working shortened days because of heat.Now that climate change has raised the Earth’s temperatures to the highest levels in recorded history, with projections showing that they will only climb further, new research shows the impact of heat on workers is spreading across the economy and lowering productivity.Extreme heat is regularly affecting workers beyond expected industries like agriculture and construction. Sizzling temperatures are causing problems for those who work in factories, warehouses and restaurants and also for employees of airlines and telecommunications firms, delivery services and energy companies. Even home health aides are running into trouble.“We’ve known for a very long time that human beings are very sensitive to temperature, and that their performance declines dramatically when exposed to heat, but what we haven’t known until very recently is whether and how those lab responses meaningfully extrapolate to the real-world economy,” said R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist at the University of Pennsylvania. “And what we are learning is that hotter temperatures appear to muck up the gears of the economy in many more ways than we would have expected.”A study published in June on the effects of temperature on productivity concludes that while extreme heat harms agriculture, its impact is greater on industrial and other sectors of the economy, in part because they are more labor-intensive. It finds that heat increases absenteeism and reduces work hours, and concludes that as the planet continues to warm, those losses will increase.The cost is high. In 2021, more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure, according to data compiled by The Lancet. Another report found that in 2020, the loss of labor as a result of heat exposure cost the economy about $100 billion, a figure projected to grow to $500 billion annually by 2050.A U.P.S. delivery in Manhattan on Monday.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesOther research found that as the mercury reaches 90 degrees Fahrenheit, productivity slumps by about 25 percent and when it goes past 100 degrees, productivity drops off by 70 percent.And the effects are unequally distributed: in poor counties, workers lose up to 5 percent of their pay with each hot day, researchers have found. In wealthy counties, the loss is less than 1 percent.Of the many economic costs of climate change —- dying crops, spiking insurance rates, flooded properties — the loss of productivity caused by heat is emerging as one of the biggest, experts say.“We know that the impacts of climate change are costing the economy,” said Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, and a former global executive for environmental and social risk at Bank of America. “The losses associated with people being hot at work, and the slowdowns and mistakes people make as a result are a huge part.”Still, there are no national regulations to protect workers from extreme heat. In 2021, the Biden administration announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would propose the first rule designed to protect workers from heat exposure. But two years later, the agency still has not released a draft of the proposed regulation.Seven states have some form of labor protections dealing with heat, but there has been a push to roll them back in some places. In June, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed a law that eliminated rules set by municipalities that mandated water breaks for construction workers, even though Texas leads all states in terms of lost productivity linked to heat, according to an analysis of federal data conducted by Vivid Economics.Business groups are opposed to a national standard, saying it would be too expensive because it would likely require rest, water and shade breaks and possibly the installation of air-conditioning.Martin Rosas, the vice president for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union International. “When it’s extremely hot, and their safety glasses fog up, their vision is impaired and they are exhausted, they can’t even see what they’re doing,” he said of the workers he represents.Brett Deering for The New York Times“OSHA should take care not to impose further regulatory burdens that make it more difficult for small businesses to grow their businesses and create jobs,” wrote David S. Addington, vice president of the National Federation of Independent Business, in response to OSHA’s plan to write a regulation.Marc Freedman, vice president of employment policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, said, “I don’t think anyone is dismissing the hazard of overexposure to heat.” But, he said, “Is an OSHA standard the right way to do it? A lot of employers are already taking measures, and the question will be, what more do they have to do?”The National Beef slaughterhouse in Dodge City, Kan., where temperatures are expected to hover above 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the next week, is cooled by fans, not air-conditioning.Workers wear heavy protective aprons and helmets and use water vats and hoses heated to 180 degrees to sanitize their equipment. It’s always been hot work.But this year is different, said one worker, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. The heat inside the slaughterhouse is intense, drenching employees in sweat and making it hard to get through a shift, the worker said.National Beef did not respond to emails or telephone calls requesting comment.Martin Rosas, a union representative for meatpacking and food processing workers in Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, said sweltering conditions present a risk for food contamination. After workers skin a hide, they need to ensure that debris doesn’t get on the meat or carcass. “But when it’s extremely hot, and their safety glasses fog up, their vision is impaired and they are exhausted, they can’t even see what they’re doing,” Mr. Rosas said.Almost 200 employees out of roughly 2,500, have quit at the Dodge City National Beef plant since May, Mr. Rosas said. That’s about 10 percent higher than usual for that time period, he said.Maria Rodriguez, who has worked at the same McDonald’s in Los Angeles for 20 years, walked out on July 21.Jessica Pons for The New York TimesBut even some workers in air-conditioned settings are getting too hot. McDonald’s workers in Los Angeles walked off the job this summer as the air-conditioned kitchens were overwhelmed by the sweltering heat outside.“There is an air-conditioner in every part of the store, but the thermostat in the kitchen still showed it was over 100 degrees,” said Maria Rodriguez, who has worked at the same McDonald’s on Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles for 20 years, but walked out on July 21, sacrificing a day of pay. “It’s been hot before, but never like this summer. I felt terrible — like I could pass out or faint at any moment.”Nicole Enearu, the owner of the store, said in a statement, “We understand that there’s an uncomfortable heat wave in LA, which is why we’re even more focused on ensuring the safety of our employees inside our restaurants. Our air-conditioning is functioning properly at this location.”Tony Hedgepeth, a home health aide in Richmond, Va., cares for a client whose home thermostat is typically set at about 82 degrees. Last week, the temperature inside was near 94 degrees.Any heat is a challenge in Mr. Hedgepeth’s job. “Bathing, cooking, lifting and moving him, cleaning him,” he said. “It’s all physical. It’s a lot of sweat.”Warehouse workers across the country are also feeling the heat. Sersie Cobb, a forklift driver who stocks boxes of pasta in a warehouse in Columbia, S.C., said the stifling heat can make it difficult to breathe. “Sometimes I get dizzy and start seeing dots,” Mr. Cobb said. “My vision starts to go black. I stop work immediately when that happens. Two times this summer I’ve had heart palpitations from the heat, and left work early to go to the E.R.”In Southern California, a group of 84 striking Amazon delivery workers say that one of their priorities is getting the company to make it safe to work in extreme heat. Last month, unionized UPS workers won a victory when the company agreed to install air-conditioning in delivery trucks.Amazon delivery drivers striking at the company’s Palmdale, Calif., warehouse and delivery center on Tuesday.Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Heat has played a tremendous role — it was one of the major issues in the negotiations,” said Carthy Boston, a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters representing UPS drivers in Washington, D.C. “Those trucks are hotboxes.”Many factories were built decades ago for a different climate and are not air-conditioned. A study on the effects of extreme temperatures on the productivity of auto plants in the United States found that a week with six or more days of heat exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit cuts production by an average of 8 percent.In Tulsa, Okla., Navistar is installing a $19 million air-conditioning system at its IC Bus factory, which produces many of America’s school buses. Temperatures on the floor can reach 99 degrees F. Currently, the plant is only cooled by overhead fans that swirl high above the assembly line.Shane Anderson, the company’s interim manager, said air-conditioning is expected to cost about $183 per hour, or between $275,000 and $500,000 per year — but the company believes it will boost worker productivity.Other employers are also adapting.Brad Maurer, who leads a construction contracting business in Michigan, where heat has caused his employees to stop working hours before quitting time at some sites.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesBrad Maurer, vice president of Leidal and Hart, which builds stadiums, hospitals and factories in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee, said managers now bring in pallets of bottled water, which they didn’t used to do, at a cost to the company of a few thousand dollars a month.Rising heat around Detroit recently caused his employees to stop working three hours early on a Ford Motors facility for several days in a row — a pattern emerging throughout his company’s work sites.“It means costs go up, production goes down, we may not meet schedules, and guys and women don’t get paychecks,” Mr. Maurer said. Labor experts say that as employers adapt to the new reality of the changing climate, they will have to pay one way or the other.“The truth is that the changes required probably will be very costly, and they will get passed on to employers and consumers,” said David Michaels, who served as assistant secretary of labor at OSHA during the Obama administration and is now a professor at the George Washington School of Public Health.“But if we don’t want these workers to get killed we will have to pay that cost.”David Gelles More

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    Harvard’s Francesca Gino, Dishonesty Expert, Is Accused of Fraud

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    Questions about a widely cited paper are the latest to be raised about methods used in behavioral research.Over the past two decades, dozens of behavioral scientists have risen to prominence pointing out the power of small interventions to improve well-being.The scientists said they had found that automatically enrolling people in organ donor programs would lead to higher rates of donation, and that moving healthy foods like fruit closer to the front of a buffet line would result in healthier eating.Many of these findings have attracted skepticism as other scholars showed that their effects were smaller than initially claimed, or that they had little impact at all. But in recent days, the field may have sustained its most serious blow yet: accusations that a prominent behavioral scientist fabricated results in multiple studies, including at least one purporting to show how to elicit honest behavior.The scholar, Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, has been a co-author of dozens of papers in peer-reviewed journals on such topics as how rituals like silently counting to 10 before deciding what to eat can increase the likelihood of choosing healthier food, and how networking can make professionals feel dirty.Maurice Schweitzer, a behavioral scientist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said the accusations were having large “reverberations in the academic community” because Dr. Gino is someone who has “so many collaborators, so many articles, who is really a leading scholar in the field.”Dr. Schweitzer said that he was now going through the eight papers on which he collaborated with Dr. Gino for indications of fraud, and that many other scholars were doing so as well.Behavioral work is common in psychology, management and economics, and scholars can straddle these disciplines. According to her résumé, Dr. Gino has a Ph.D. in economics and management from an Italian university.Questions about her work surfaced in an article on June 16 in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a 2012 paper written by Dr. Gino and four colleagues. One of Dr. Gino’s co-authors — Max H. Bazerman, also of Harvard Business School — told The Chronicle that the university had informed him that a study overseen by Dr. Gino for the paper appeared to include fabricated results.The 2012 paper reported that asking people who fill out tax or insurance documents to attest to the truth of their responses at the top of the document rather than at the bottom significantly increased the accuracy of the information they provided. The paper has been cited hundreds of times by other scholars, but more recent work had cast serious doubt on its findings.Dr. Gino did not respond to a request for comment, and Harvard Business School declined to comment. Reached by phone, a man who identified himself as Dr. Gino’s husband said, “It’s obviously something that is very sensitive that we can’t speak to now.”Dr. Bazerman did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but told The Chronicle of Higher Education that he had had nothing to do with any fabrication.On June 17, a blog run by three behavioral scientists, called DataColada, posted a detailed discussion of evidence that the results of a study by Dr. Gino for the 2012 paper had been falsified. The post said that the bloggers contacted Harvard Business School in the fall of 2021 to raise concerns about Dr. Gino’s work, providing the university with a report that included evidence of fraud in the 2012 paper as well as in three other papers on which she collaborated.The blog — by Uri Simonsohn of ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Leif Nelson of the University of California, Berkeley, and Joseph Simmons of the University of Pennsylvania — focuses on the integrity and reliability of social science research. The post on Dr. Gino noted that Harvard had placed her on administrative leave, a fact that was reflected on her business school web page, though no reason was given. The Internet Archive, which catalogs web pages, shows that Dr. Gino was not on leave as recently as mid-May.The 2012 paper was based on three separate studies. One study overseen by Dr. Gino involved a lab experiment in which about 100 participants were asked to complete a worksheet featuring 20 puzzles and were promised $1 for every puzzle they solved.The study’s participants later filled out a form reporting how much money they had earned from solving the puzzles. The participants were led to believe that cheating would be undetected, when in fact the researchers could verify how many puzzles they had solved.The study found that participants were much more likely to report their puzzle income honestly if they attested to the accuracy of their responses at the top of the form rather than the bottom.But in their blog post, Dr. Simonsohn, Dr. Nelson and Dr. Simmons, analyzing data that Dr. Gino and her co-authors had posted online, cited a digital record contained within an Excel file to demonstrate that some of the data points had been tampered with, and that the tampering helped drive the result.Last week’s post was not the first time the DataColada watchdogs had found problems with the 2012 paper by Dr. Gino and her co-authors. In a blog post in August 2021, the same researchers found evidence that another study published in the same paper appeared to rely on manufactured data.That study relied on data provided by an insurance company, to which customers reported the mileage of cars covered by their policy. The study purported to find that customers who were asked at the top of the form to attest to the truthfulness of the information they would provide were significantly more honest than customers who were asked to attest to their truthfulness at the bottom of the form.But through analysis of the raw data, Dr. Simonsohn, Dr. Nelson and Dr. Simmons concluded that many of the data points were created by someone connected to the study, not based on customer information. The journal that published the 2012 paper, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, retracted it the month after the blog post appeared.In that case, another of the paper’s co-authors, Dan Ariely of Duke University, was the scholar who procured the data from the insurance company. Dr. Ariely, one of the world’s best-known behavioral scientists, said in an email on Friday that he had been “stunned and surprised” to learn that some of the insurance data in the paper had been fabricated, “which led me to proactively retract it.”DataColada has since published blog posts laying out evidence that results were fabricated in two other papers of which Dr. Gino was a co-author. The bloggers have written that they plan to publish one more post laying out issues in an additional paper on which she collaborated.In interviews and comments on social media, some scholars said that findings in the genre of behavioral research that Dr. Gino specializes in, which is closer to psychology, often resemble findings generated by questionable research methods.One category of questionable methods, said Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at the California Institute of Technology, is p-hacking — for example, testing a series of arbitrary data combinations until the researcher arrives at an inflated statistical correlation.In 2015, a team of scholars reported that they had tried to replicate the results of 100 studies published in prominent psychology journals and succeeded in fewer than half the cases. The behavioral studies proved especially hard to replicate. More

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    Silicon Valley Chosen for $4 Billion Chip Research Center

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    Anticipating federal subsidies, Applied Materials said it planned to invest up to $4 billion in the semiconductor project in Sunnyvale, Calif.Silicon Valley got its name from computer chips, but no longer plays a central role in shaping how they are made. A major supplier to the industry hopes to change that.Applied Materials, the biggest maker of machines for producing semiconductors, said on Monday that it planned to build a massive research facility near its hometown, Santa Clara, Calif., to allow chip makers and universities to collaborate on advances to make more powerful chips. Silicon Valley hasn’t seen a comparable semiconductor construction project in more than 30 years, industry analysts say.The company expects to invest up to $4 billion in the project over seven years, with a portion of that money coming from federal subsidies, while creating up to 2,000 engineering jobs.The plan is the latest in a string of chip-related projects spurred by the CHIPs Act, a $52 billion package of subsidies that Congress passed last year to reduce U.S. dependence on Asian factories for the critical components. What sets Applied Materials’ move apart is that it focuses on research, rather than manufacturing, and is a substantial new commitment to the industry’s original hub.Chip makers that grew up in Silicon Valley have long chosen to build new “fabs,” the sophisticated factories that fabricate chips from silicon wafers, in less costly states and countries. But Applied Materials is betting that technical talent at nearby universities and the local companies that design chips will spur innovation quickly, making up for cost differences with other locations.“You can connect more leaders in this ecosystem here than anyplace in the world,” said Gary Dickerson, the chief executive of Applied Materials. “There’s no place like this.”Applied Materials has scheduled an event on Monday in Sunnyvale, Calif., to discuss the project, with expected guests including Vice President Kamala Harris.Politicians from both parties overwhelmingly supported the CHIPs Act, partly out of fears that China will one day exert control over Taiwan and factories there that produce the most advanced chips. Besides encouraging domestic chip manufacturing, the legislation allocated about $11 billion to spur related research and development.Chip research now takes place in several phases in multiple locations, including university labs and collaborative centers such as the Albany NanoTech Complex in New York. Applied Materials participates with other companies in that center and operates a research fab in Silicon Valley where chip makers can work with its machines and those of other toolmakers.But many of the core chores in developing new production processes are carried out by chip manufacturers in fabs outfitted with a broad array of equipment. The proposed center, which Applied Materials calls Epic, is set to have ultraclean production space bigger than three football fields and is designed to give university researchers and other engineers comparable resources to experiment with new materials and techniques for creating advanced chips.One goal is to reduce the time it takes for new ideas to flow from the research labs to companies designing new manufacturing gear, information that is now often delayed as it is filtered through the chip makers.“The trouble is, those customers need time to figure out what they need,” said H.-S. Philip Wong, a Stanford professor of electrical engineering who was briefed on the company’s plans. “There is a big hole in there.”Applied Materials also said chip makers would be able to reserve space in the center and try out new tools before they were commercially available.The plan hinges partly on whether Applied Materials can win subsidies under the CHIPs Act, which the Commerce Department says has already attracted expressions of interest from more than 300 companies. Mr. Dickerson said that the company planned to build the center in any case, but that government funding could affect the project’s scale.Assuming the center evolves as planned, it could substantially bolster Silicon Valley’s role in the evolution of chips, said G. Dan Hutcheson, vice chair at the market research firm TechInsights.“It really is a vote of confidence for the Valley,” he said. More

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    Commerce Dept. Outlines Its Bid to Fund Cutting-Edge Chip Research

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    The Biden administration announced its strategy for the National Semiconductor Technology Center, a string of facilities aimed at propelling U.S. innovation.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration outlined plans on Tuesday to propel research on the type of cutting-edge microchips needed to power computers, cars and other devices, saying it would establish a new national organization with locations in various parts of the United States.The Commerce Department, which is in charge of the administration’s efforts to revitalize the American chip industry, said its new National Semiconductor Technology Center would bring together companies, universities and others to collaborate on next-generation chip technology. The organization would include a string of research centers, the locations of which have yet to be chosen, and aim to be operational by the end of this year.The organization would help “regain America’s leadership in research and development and technologies of the future, and importantly, make sure we stay there for decades to come,” Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, said in a briefing Monday.“It’s a place where industry and academia and start-ups and investors can come together to solve the biggest, grandest challenges and set priorities,” she added.The plans are part of the Biden administration’s effort to reinvigorate semiconductor manufacturing and ensure that the United States has a steady supply of chips necessary to feed its factories and support its national defense. The Commerce Department has been charged with doling out $50 billion to revitalize the industry, including $11 billion devoted to research and development.The technology center is expected to be central to that effort. Some of its locations would be capable of end-to-end manufacturing of new chip designs, while others would focus on experimenting with new materials and equipment, or with new ways of putting chips together to make them more powerful, Ms. Raimondo said.Laurie Giandomenico, the vice president and chief acceleration officer of MITRE, a nonprofit organization that operates federally funded research centers, called the $11 billion investment by the United States “pretty significant,” given that the semiconductor industry has in past years spent about $70 billion on research and development globally.The challenge, she said, would be to ensure that the money was spent to encourage collaborative research to solve the industry’s biggest problems, not the “siloed innovation” now carried out by chip firms that carefully guard their creations from competitors.“It should be on areas that no one company can solve alone,” she said.Companies, universities, lawmakers and local governments have been lobbying the administration to set up an outpost of the new organization in their area. Ms. Raimondo emphasized that the organization would be an independent “trusted” player, with board members appointed by a separate selection committee and strict controls for protecting intellectual property.One of the organization’s primary goals, Ms. Raimondo said, would be making it easier and less expensive for start-ups and other new entrants to develop and commercialize new chip technologies.“We want to cut in half the projected cost of moving a new chip from concept to commercialization over the next decade,” she said.Chris Miller, the author of “Chip War,” which chronicles the industry’s development, said it was comparatively easy for a researcher to develop a new idea for a chip in a laboratory. But given the high cost of producing chips, researchers can have a hard time getting their inventions manufactured.Designing an advanced chip, which may have tens of billions of transistors, can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, according to analysts. The latest systems for defining the smallest circuitry on wafers cost more than $100 million each, while the new factories called “fabs” that make advanced chips can cost $10 billion to $20 billion.“The big fabs are interested in producing 100 million chips for an iPhone, not 10 chips for a professor at M.I.T.,” Mr. Miller said.Venture capitalists also often shy away from investing in chip start-ups because they require more initial funding than other kinds of tech companies and more time to generate a return on that investment.To help address some of these issues, the government’s technology center will establish an investment fund to support start-ups, and provide manufacturing facilities for small players to experiment with new technologies.“I see a world where the U.S. can actually revitalize this microelectronics industry because we could bring down the costs of doing a chip start-up by a factor of five to a factor of ten,” said Gilman Louie, a tech investor and chief executive of a nonprofit investment organization called America’s Frontier Fund.The center’s research priorities are expected to be refined in the coming months. But the Commerce Department specified several areas it would focus on, including advancing the technology for analyzing the microscopic components of chips and setting technical standards for new kinds of chip packaging.As progress slows in squeezing ever-smaller transistors onto each piece of silicon, many companies are now breaking up big products into smaller “chiplets” that are placed side by side or stacked on top of one another.The Commerce Department said that setting new standards for these practices would pave the way for the creation of marketplaces in which companies can assemble new products using chiplets from multiple vendors. More