Question

From the article: “Pocantico Hills Central School District has installed two 30-by-30-foot tents as additional classrooms at its campus in New York’s Westchester County. The district’s… students are set to begin full-time, in-person classes next week. It has purchased extra desks to replace tables, upgraded filters in its ventilation system and installed standalong air filters in every classroom.” Is this an example of a short run or a long run production response by the Pocantico Hills Central School District? Explain your answer.

Answer 1

This is a long run production response by the school.

Lets first see what short and long run are. In the short-run, from an economic perspective, only a few variables can be changed. In the long run, even the fixed costs can change while in the short run, only variable costs can be changed.

In this scenario, the costs that are variable with the number of students would be considered short run. So, considering the response to the epidemic, we can consider that number of tables, number of masks etc would be the short run costs. But since the school is also changing its fixed costs which include filters and ventilation systems etc- things which are not dependent directly on the number of students, it means this is a long run response and not a short run one.