Environmental and Urban Economics

I first heard about Jane Jacobs' work from Ed Glaeser when he was starting to write his well known JPE paper (1992) testing whether more diverse or more specialized cities grow faster. Glaeser's Dream Team of co-authors found that "Jacobs beat Marshall-Arrow-Romer". More diverse cities grew faster.

Why could diversity foster economic growth? In a dense, diverse city such as New York City, firms could learn from each other and synergies could be realized. In today's sprawling office parks, is there less cross-firm learning? We see Microsoft building and expanding its enormous corporate campus near Seattle. Clearly, learning is going on within this firm but not across nearby firms.

Diverse cities are also more likely to be diversified.

My wife and I were having a deep discussion the other day about how many natural gas explosions there might be in Los Angeles if a serious earthquake took place. I argued that this type of contingency is predictable and the smart government officials in Los Angeles must have installed a plan to handle this contingency. My wife wondered if my faith in government was over-stated.

Classes at Tufts end next week. I am ready for summer time. I need the peace and quiet to write 6 different papers that I had thought i would have finished by now. I have fallen so far behind on my tasks that I've stopped blogging for weeks now. I'm sure you've noted my absence!

I was going to write an entry on what factors determine whether an ambitious economics department moves up in the "rankings" and enters the top 20 or top 10.

Classes at Tufts end next week. I am ready for summer time. I need the peace and quiet to write 6 different papers that I had thought i would have finished by now. I have fallen so far behind on my tasks that I've stopped blogging for weeks now. I'm sure you've noted my absence!

I was going to write an entry on what factors determine whether an ambitious economics department moves up in the "rankings" and enters the top 20 or top 10.

On April 7th, I attended a great NBER environmental economics conference. If you would like to the see the papers presented take a look at this link.

http://www.nber.org/~confer/2006/ees06/EEs06prg.html. I'm hoping that ABC's 20/20 might run a show about our next conference!

I wanted to briefly blog about Pfaff et. al. paper on Arsenic Contamination of Groundwater in Bangladesh. The public health officials are convinced that this is a serious problem. Pfaff's team did something real simple.

Should the U.S follow France and produce more electricity using nuclear power? How much power? Where should these nuclear power plants be located? Upwind of New York City and Boston? Have people gotten over their fears of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl? Has technological advance made enough progress to sharply reduce the probability of future "meltdowns"?

This NYT article below argues that some small southern towns are trying to lure nuclear plants to locate there.

My son keeps telling me that after the Titanic sank in 1912 all subsequent passenger ships were required to have a lifeboat seat for each passenger on board. Such an ex-post response is the tip of the iceberg. Shocks such as 9/11, Enron's meltdown, Bhopal, coal mining accidents that are publicized, new drug fatalities (i.e vioxx) all appear to trigger serious responses.

Rarely are they "written off" as flukes that won't take place again.

Why have Japanese car makers been leaders in developing "Green cars" such as those mentioned below? How much higher are gas prices there relative to the U.S? At the end of the article there is a discussion of the roughly $5,000 subsidy U.S drivers receive for buying such hybrid cars. I have not seen a cost/benefit study examining the size of the "social benefits" of purchasing a hybrid versus a conventional (i.e reduced greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution) relative to this subsidy.

Do economists write best sellers? Could a movie be based on Joe Stiglitz books? Who would play the head of the IMF? According to Amazon's website. Freakonomics is ranked #12, Ben Friedman's book "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth" is ranked 6,211 and Jeff Sach's book "The End of Poverty" is ranked 543. In the recent issue of the Journal of Economic Literature, William Easterly has some tough things to say in his review of Sachs' book.

I wanted to report some research on what types of first names are correlated with greater economic success. I've learned that "Matthew" is not a sufficient treatment and I'm considering changing my first name to "Dora", "Ed", "Steve", "Larry", "Gary", or "Andrei" but I haven't made up my mind yet.