Christopher P. Barrington-Leigh

• Professor (Associate) at McGill University

Systems of street networks form a backbone for many aspects of human life and, once laid down, urban streets represent a nearly immutable influence on future urban form and concomitant travel, energy, and social outcomes. Moreover, as humanity is currently passing through its peak urbanization rate, decisions about how to design such networks at th...

I investigate the role of income inequality in accounting for dif-ferences in subjective well-being ("happiness") across countries, using Gallup's annual global household survey, the World Poll. First, in order to motivate a focus on (ordinal) income quantile rather than cardinal income, I show that, globally, income quantile within coun-tries (and...

One of the significant developments in the last four decades of economics is the growing empirical evidence that individual consumption preferences, as mea- sured by self-reported life satisfaction, are neither fixed nor self-centred but are instead overwhelmingly dominated by externalities, partly in the form of reference levels set by others and...

We present a global time series of street-network sprawl—that is, sprawl as measured through the local connectivity of the street network. Using high-resolution data from OpenStreetMap and a satellite-derived time series of urbanization, we compute and validate changes over time in multidimensional street connectivity measures based on graph-theore...

Disconnected urban street networks, which we call “street-network sprawl,” are strongly associated with increased vehicle travel, energy use and CO2 emissions, as shown by previous research in Europe and North America. In this paper, we provide the first systematic and globally commensurable measures of street-network sprawl based on graph-theoreti...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0180698.].

To mitigate health and environmental effects from coal-based home heating, the Beijing Municipality has implemented a programme in 3,700 villages that subsidizes electric heat pumps and electricity, and bans coal. Here, we estimate this programme’s impact on household energy use and expenditure, well-being and indoor environmental quality by compar...

Disconnected urban street networks, which we call “street-network sprawl,” are strongly associated with increased vehicle travel, energy use and CO_{2} emissions, as shown by previous research in Europe and North America. In this paper, we provide the first systematic and globally commensurable measures of street-network sprawl based on graph-theor...

We present the first global time series of street-network sprawl — that is, sprawl as measured through the local connectivity of the street network. Using high-resolution data from OpenStreetMap and a satellite-derived time series of urbanization, we compute and validate changes over time in multidimensional street connectivity measures based on gr...

This paper presents a new public-use dataset for community-level life satisfaction in Canada, based on more than 500,000 observations from the Canadian Community Health Surveys and the General Social Surveys. The country is divided into 1216 similarly sampled geographic regions, using natural, built, and administrative boundaries. A cross-validatio...

Subjective well-being surveys show large and consistent variation among countries, much of which can be predicted from a small number of social and economic proxy variables. But the degree to which these life evaluations might feasibly change over coming decades, at the global scale, has not previously been estimated. Here, we use observed historic...

A large "happiness", or life satisfaction, literature in economics makes use of Likert-like scales in assessing survey respondents' cognitive evaluations of their lives. These measures are being used to estimate economic benefits in every empirical field of economics. Typically, analysis of these data have shown remarkably low direct returns of edu...

Self-reported, quantitative, subjective measures of well-being, such as satisfaction with life overall, are increasingly looked to as measures of public welfare. While this trend is visible at the international and national government levels, regional initiatives and local communities are particularly important in seeking meaningful measures of the...

OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced geographic database, provides the only global-level, openly licensed source of geospatial road data, and the only national-level source in many countries. However, researchers, policy makers, and citizens who want to make use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have little information about whether it can be relied upon in a partic...

Further details on methods, results, and source data. A separate PDF outlines all associated resources. These resources are permanently available at https://alum.mit.edu/www/cpbl/publications/PLOS2017roads. (PDF)

Purpose Subjective well-being (SWB) in youths positively relates to family income, however its association with income during childhood is unclear. Using longitudinal data from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (n = 2234 adolescents, age 12–19 years), we examined whether the timing and duration of low family income in childhood was associated w...

Sensitivity analyses of the direct effect estimates of family income quintile by childhood period on subjective well-being at adolescence, using marginal structural modeling. Estimates from a marginal structural model using stabilized weights to account for time-invariant and time-varying covariates (sex, age, race/ethnicity, marital status, educat...

Sensitivity analyses of the effect estimates of the number of years spent in the two poorest family income quintiles on subjective well-being at adolescence. Estimates from linear regression models, adjusted for time-invariant covariates (sex, age, race/ethnicity of primary caregiver, birth year of child) and time-varying covariates (marital status...

Diagram of the relationship between family income quintile and confounders over time. C represents time-invariant covariates, including age, sex and race/ethnicity of the primary caregiver, and birth year of the child. HIQ1, HIQ2, HIQ3, HIQ4, HIQ5, represent the family income quintile at childhood period 1 (early childhood), period 2 (pre-school ye...

Items on the subjective well-being scale in the CDS-II and CDS-III. (DOCX)

Characteristics of CDS participants measured at adolescence by missing data status. (DOCX)

Details on sensitive period model specification. (DOCX)

The new science of ‘happiness’ is revolutionizing our ability to measure social progress. Factors such as meaningful relationships and a sense of purpose and belonging have been shown to be essential to human well-being; indeed, they contribute even more than income. The happiest societies foster dignity for all, in part through robust investment i...

One important objective of community indicator initiatives, often explicit in their title or mandate, is to assess overall well-being, life quality, or social progress. These concepts are increasingly becoming accountable to the evaluation survey respondents give when asked about how their life feels, overall. Such quantitative, subjective data are...

We quantify the importance of early action to tackle urban sprawl. We focus on the long-term nature of infrastructure decisions, specifically local roadways, which can lock in greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The location and interconnectedness of local roadways form a near-permanent backbone for the future layout of land parcels, buil...

Life satisfaction has been widely used in recent years for evaluating the effect of environmental factors on individuals’ well-being. In this study, using two major health surveys in Canada, we show that after controlling for individuals’ socioeconomic characteristics as well as local and seasonal climate, temporal weather variations have an impact...

Numerous strategies for sourcing renewable energy are available for development and expansion, yet for many countries the idea of eventually transitioning to a completely renewable energy supply using domestic resources currently appears unfeasible. As a large country with low population density, Canada may be expected to face fewer obstacles in th...

To estimate the impact of air pollution on well-being, we combine a set of repeated cross-sectional surveys of individuals with high-resolution pollution and weather data. The respondents’ level of life satisfaction is modeled as a function of their socioeconomic characteristics and income as well as the weather and air pollution on the day of the...

Subjective measures of overall quality of life are built in to numerous surveys in Canada and around the world, and are increasingly analyzed and used as indicators of human well-being and social progress. Yet, even in Canada, federal surveys exclude Aboriginal peoples on-reserve and, in general, there are very few data sources on life satisfaction...

Resistance to the implementation of greenhouse gas pricing policies comes in part from fears about the concentrated impacts on certain industries, certain regions, and on less affluent households. These distributional concerns are valid and, to be fair, policy can accommodate some transitional measures to soften the impact of sudden policy changes....

Significance Urban development patterns in the 20th century have been increasingly typified by urban sprawl, which exacerbates climate change, energy and material consumption, and public health challenges. We construct the first long-run, high-resolution time series of street-network sprawl in the United States. We find that even in the absence of...

In the present context, consumption externalities are the (unpaid) social costs imposed on others through conspicuous consumption of goods, when these impacts have their eect purely through information about the choice and ability to consume, rather than from (material) side eects or byproducts of consumption. That is, consumption externalities ree...

De plus en plus de sondages, réalisés par des gouvernements ou des entreprises privées, tentent de mesurer la satisfaction face à la vie, cette mesure étant obtenue grâce à des instruments d’auto-évaluation. Au Canada, de tels sondages n’ont pas été faits de façon systématique au fil des ans, mais les données recueillies depuis 1985, de même que de...

This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: Human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). In Study 1, survey data from 136 countries were examined and showed that prosocial spending is associated with greater happiness around the...

This study proposes a new technique for real-time building energy modelling and event detection using kernel regression. We show that this technique can exceed the performance of conventional neural network algorithms, and do so by a large margin when the available training dataset is small. Furthermore, unlike the synapse weights in a neural netwo...

This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). Analyzing survey data from 136 countries, we show that prosocial spending is consistently associated with greater happiness. To test for ca...

Increasing attention is being paid in academic, policy, and public arenas to subjective measures of well-being. This promising trend represents a shift towards measuring positive outcomes in psychology and greater realism in the study of economic behaviour. We describe the main measures of subjective well-being (SWB) and provide examples of policy-...

Increasing attention is being paid in academic, policy, and public arenas to subjective measures of well-being. This promising trend represents a shift towards measuring positive outcomes in psychology and greater realism in the study of economic behaviour. After a general review of past and potential uses for subjective well-being data, and a disc...

This paper uses data from global and Canadian surveys data to estimate the powerful linkages between social connections, their related social identities, and subjective well-being. Our explanatory variables include several measures of the extent and frequency of use of social networks, combined with a number of measures of general and domain-specif...

This paper uses the first three waves of the Gallup World Poll to investigate differences across countries, cultures and regions in the factors linked to life satisfaction, paying special attention to the social context. Our principal findings are: First, using the larger pooled sample, we find that answers to the satisfaction with life and Cantril...

Departures from self-centred, consumption-oriented decision making are increasingly common in economic theory and are well motivated by a wide range of behavioural data from experiments, surveys, and econometric inference. A number of studies have shown large negative externalities in individual subjective well-being due to neighbours' incomes. The...

Local weather conditions experienced by survey respondents on the day of the interview are used to assess the size of any bias resulting from transient affective influences on subjective response data and to test the validity of statistical inference about the determinants of subjective well-being.

Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) from Earth's upper atmosphere have been detected with the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) satellite. The gamma-ray spectra typically extend up to 10 to 20 megaelectron volts (MeV); a simple bremsstrahlung model suggests that most of the electrons that produce the gamma rays have ene...

Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (millisecond bursts of gamma-rays seen from space) have been observed by only one instrument until now, the Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) on the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory. BATSE saw less than one event per month, but its 9-year lifetime was enough to establish a connection between these events and t...

In 1991, NASA launched the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO), carrying aboard multiple detectors of the Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE). BATSE's mission was to study cosmic gamma-ray bursts, but it unexpectedly detected gamma-ray flashes from our atmosphere, dubbed Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs). These events may be caused by...

The magnitudes of scattered fields produced during early/fast very low frequency (VLF) events observed at 13 closely spaced (∼65 km) sites are compared with those expected for sprite halo disturbances using a numerical model of wave propagation within the Earth-ionosphere waveguide. Three different early/fast events of varying magnitudes are analyz...

RHESSI is the sixth in the NASA line of Small Explorer (SMEX) missions and the first managed in the Principal Investigator mode, where the PI is responsible for all aspects of the mission except the launch vehicle. RHESSI is designed to investigate particle acceleration and energy release in solar flares, through imaging and spectroscopy of hard X-...

Brief (1--5~ms) flashes of gamma-rays coming from the direction of Earth's atmosphere were discovered by the BATSE instrument aboard the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) in 1994. CGRO was deorbited in June 2000, but during its lifetime 75 Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) were observed. The source of the photons is generally assumed to lie a...

University Microfilms order no. 3000005. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 2000. Includes bibliographical references.

Confusion in the interpretation of standard-speed video observations of optical flashes above intense cloud-to-ground lightning discharges has persisted for a number of years. New high speed (3000 frames per second) image-intensified video recordings are used along with theoretical modeling to elucidate the optical signatures of elves and sprites....

Telescopic images of sprites show a wide variety of generally vertical but also slanted fine structure, includ-ing branching tree-like shapes and well defined but isolated columns, with transverse spatial scales ranging from tens of meters to a few hundred meters at ∼60–85 km altitude. Simultaneous analysis of radio atmospheric and lightning data i...

High altitude air breakdown, manifested as “red sprites,” is reported in close association with negative cloud-to-ground lightning (-CG) on at least two occasions above an unusual storm on August 29, 1998. Data from high speed photometry, low-light-level video, and receivers of lightning electromagnetic signatures in the frequency range 10 Hz to 20...

. Optical flashes in the lower ionosphere due to the transient heating caused by lightning electromagnetic pulses (EMP) are unambiguously identified with the Fly's Eye photometric array. Data from a thunderstorm over Mexico recorded at Langmuir Laboratory on August 27 1997 demonstrate that relatively common negative cloud-toground lightning is a pr...

Measurements of ELF-radiating currents asso-ciated with sprite-producing lightning discharges exhibit a second current peak simultaneous in time with sprite lumi-nosity, suggesting that the observed ELF radiation is pro-duced by intense electrical currents flowing in the body of the sprite.

Data acquired by a new array of horizontally spaced photometers boresighted with a low-light-level camera provide the first measurement of the rapid lateral expansion of optical luminosity in lightning-induced ionospheric flashes referred to as ‘elves’, occurring over time scales substantially less than 1 ms. The narrow individual fields-of-view of...

When respondents provide their own subjective evaluation of life quality, or sat-isfaction, on a zero-to-ten scale, the global country-weighted average is exactly 5.0. What would it have been 100 years ago? In this study I assess competing theories of cardinal and ordinal income position for explaining life satisfaction around the world, both withi...

Submitted to the Department of Applied Physics. Copyright by the author. Thesis (Ph. D.) -- Stanford University, 2000.

The optical emissions in a large number of bright sprites observed over one storm in 1998 exhibit a relaxation that is closely exponential in time. This feature was unexpected but might be explained by the presence of quasi-constant electric fields over times of several milliseconds, in which case the optical relaxation would be a direct indication...