As China's economy grows, what are the likely environmental impacts for China and for the rest of the World? This New York Times piece does a pretty good job laying out the key issues. It does not attempt to examine what are the priorities of the key government officials who have the power to curb pollution exports. Put bluntly, if public health researchers claim that current levels of Chinese coal burning cause a loss of 1 million statistical lives in China is this a sufficient cost to encourage the governemnt to "do something"? A Mancur Olson pressure group story would say that the "victims" from the pollution face high transaction costs to work together to lobby the government.
On top of the within China externalities, this article claims that pollution exports from China are reaching California. If this is a serious problem, then the U.S should consider transfering "green technologies" to China and subsidizing such activity to reduce both the sulfur dioxide emissions and the C02 emissions from power plants.
One other point; will China sign a "Kyoto Protocol" by the year 2050? They will be less likely to do so if they have invested in costly dirty coal fired plants that are difficult to retrofit with "green technologies". This article does not do a good job discussing how China's choices today affect its future climate change policies.
June 11, 2006
The Energy Challenge
Pollution From Chinese Coal Casts a Global Shadow
By KEITH BRADSHER and DAVID BARBOZA
HANJING, China — One of China's lesser-known exports is a dangerous brew of soot, toxic chemicals and climate-changing gases from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants.
In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants over Northern China sailed to nearby Seoul, sweeping along dust and desert sand before wafting across the Pacific. An American satellite spotted the cloud as it crossed the West Coast.
Researchers in California, Oregon and Washington noticed specks of sulfur compounds, carbon and other byproducts of coal combustion coating the silvery surfaces of their mountaintop detectors. These microscopic particles can work their way deep into the lungs, contributing to respiratory damage, heart disease and cancer.
Filters near Lake Tahoe in the mountains of eastern California "are the darkest that we've seen" outside smoggy urban areas, said Steven S. Cliff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Davis.
Unless China finds a way to clean up its coal plants and the thousands of factories that burn coal, pollution will soar both at home and abroad. The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.
The sulfur dioxide produced in coal combustion poses an immediate threat to the health of China's citizens, contributing to about 400,000 premature deaths a year. It also causes acid rain that poisons lakes, rivers, forests and crops.
The sulfur pollution is so pervasive as to have an extraordinary side effect that is helping the rest of the world, but only temporarily: It actually slows global warming. The tiny, airborne particles deflect the sun's hot rays back into space.
But the cooling effect from sulfur is short-lived. By contrast, the carbon dioxide emanating from Chinese coal plants will last for decades, with a cumulative warming effect that will eventually overwhelm the cooling from sulfur and deliver another large kick to global warming, climate scientists say. A warmer climate could lead to rising sea levels, the spread of tropical diseases in previously temperate climes, crop failures in some regions and the extinction of many plant and animal species, especially those in polar or alpine areas.
Coal is indeed China's double-edged sword — the new economy's black gold and the fragile environment's dark cloud.
Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.
To make matters worse, India is right behind China in stepping up its construction of coal-fired power plants — and has a population expected to outstrip China's by 2030.
Aware of the country's growing reliance on coal and of the dangers from burning so much of it, China's leaders have vowed to improve the nation's energy efficiency. No one thinks that effort will be enough. To make a big improvement in emissions of global-warming gases and other pollutants, the country must install the most modern equipment — equipment that for the time being must come from other nations.
Industrialized countries could help by providing loans or grants, as the Japanese government and the World Bank have done, or by sharing technology. But Chinese utilities have in the past preferred to buy cheap but often-antiquated equipment from well connected domestic suppliers instead of importing costlier gear from the West.
The Chinese government has been reluctant to approve the extra spending. Asking customers to shoulder the bill would set back the government's efforts to protect consumers from inflation and to create jobs and social stability.
But each year China defers buying advanced technology, older equipment goes into scores of new coal-fired plants with a lifespan of up to 75 years.
"This is the great challenge they have to face," said David Moskovitz, an energy consultant who advises the Chinese government. "How can they continue their rapid growth without plunging the environment into the abyss?"
Living Better With Coal
Wu Yiebing and his wife, Cao Waiping, used to have very little effect on their environment. But they have tasted the rising standard of living from coal-generated electricity and they are hooked, even as they suffer the vivid effects of the damage their new lifestyle creates.
Years ago, the mountain village where they grew up had electricity for only several hours each evening, when water was let out of a nearby dam to turn a small turbine. They lived in a mud hut, farmed by hand from dawn to dusk on hillside terraces too small for tractors, and ate almost nothing but rice on an income of $25 a month.
Today, they live here in Hanjing, a small town in central China where Mr. Wu earns nearly $200 a month. He operates a large electric drill 600 feet underground in a coal mine, digging out the fuel that has powered his own family's advancement. He and his wife have a stereo, a refrigerator, a television, an electric fan, a phone and light bulbs, paying just $2.50 a month for all the electricity they can burn from a nearby coal-fired power plant.
They occupy a snug house with brick walls and floors and a cement foundation — the bricks and cement are products of the smoking, energy-ravenous factories that dot the valley. Ms. Cao decorates the family's home with calendar pictures of Zhang Ziyi, the Chinese film star. She is occasionally dismissive about the farming village where she lived as a girl and now seldom visits except over Chinese New Year.
"We couldn't wear high heels then because the paths were so bad and we were always carrying heavy loads," said Ms. Cao, who was wearing makeup, a stylish yellow pullover, low-slung black pants and black pumps with slender three-inch heels on a recent Sunday morning.
One-fifth of the world's population already lives in affluent countries with lots of air-conditioning, refrigerators and other appliances. This group consumes a tremendous amount of oil, natural gas, nuclear power, coal and alternative energy sources.
Now China is trying to bring its fifth of the world's population, people like Mr. Wu and Ms. Cao, up to the same standard. One goal is to build urban communities for 300 million people over the next two decades.
Already, China has more than tripled the number of air-conditioners in the past five years, to 84 per 100 urban households. And it has brought modern appliances to hundreds of millions of households in small towns and villages like Hanjing.
The difference from most wealthy countries is that China depends overwhelmingly on coal. And using coal to produce electricity and run factories generates more global-warming gases and lung-damaging pollutants than relying on oil or gas.
Indeed, the Wu family dislikes the light gray smog of sulfur particles and other pollutants that darkens the sky and dulls the dark green fields of young wheat and the white blossoms of peach orchards in the distance. But they tolerate the pollution.
"Everything else is better here," Mr. Wu said. "Now we live better, we eat better."
China's Dark Clouds
Large areas of North-Central China have been devastated by the spectacular growth of the local coal industry. Severe pollution extends across Shaanxi Province, where the Wus live, and neighboring Shanxi Province, which produces even more coal.
Not long ago, in the historic city of Datong, about 160 miles west of Beijing, throngs of children in colorful outfits formed a ceremonial line at the entrance to the city's 1,500-year-old complex of Buddhist cave grottoes to celebrate Datong's new designation as one of China's "spiritually civilized cities."
The event was meant to bolster pride in a city desperately in need of good news. Two years ago, Datong, long the nation's coal capital, was branded one of the world's most-polluted cities. Since then, the air quality has only grown worse.
Datong is so bad that last winter the city's air quality monitors went on red alert. Desert dust and particulate matter in the city had been known to force the pollution index into warning territory, above 300, which means people should stay indoors.
On Dec. 28, the index hit 350.
"The pollution is worst during the winter," said Ji Youping, a former coal miner who now works with a local environmental protection agency. "Datong gets very black. Even during the daytime, people drive with their lights on."
Of China's 10 most polluted cities, four, including Datong, are in Shanxi Province. The coal-mining operations have damaged waterways and scarred the land. Because of intense underground mining, thousands of acres are prone to sinking, and hundreds of villages are blackened with coal waste.
There is a Dickensian feel to much of the region. Roads are covered in coal tar; houses are coated with soot; miners, their faces smeared almost entirely black, haul carts full of coal rocks; the air is thick with the smell of burning coal.
There are growing concerns about the impact of this coal boom on the environment. The Asian Development Bank says it is financing pollution control programs in Shanxi because the number of people suffering from lung cancer and other respiratory diseases in the province has soared over the past 20 years. Yet even after years of government-mandated cleanup efforts the region's factories belch black smoke.
The government has promised to close the foulest factories and to shutter thousands of illegal mines, where some of the worst safety and environmental hazards are concentrated. But no one is talking about shutting the region's coal-burning power plants, which account for more than half the pollution. In fact, Shanxi and Shaanxi are rapidly building new coal-fired plants to keep pace with soaring energy demand.
To meet that demand, which includes burning coal to supply power to Beijing, Shanxi Province alone is expected to produce almost as much coal as was mined last year in Germany, England and Russia combined.
Burning all that coal releases enormous quantities of sulfur.
"Sulfur dioxide is China's No. 1 pollution problem," said Barbara A. Finamore, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council's China Clean Energy Program in Washington. "This is the most serious acid rain problem in the world."
China released about 22.5 million tons of sulfur in 2004, more than twice the amount released in the United States, and a Chinese regulator publicly estimated last autumn that emissions would reach 26 million tons for 2005, although no official figures have been released yet. Acid rain now falls on 30 percent of China.
Studies have found that the worst effects of acid rain and other pollution occur within several hundred miles of a power plant, where the extra acidity of rainfall can poison crops, trees and lakes alike.
But China is generating such enormous quantities of pollution that the effects are felt farther downwind than usual. Sulfur and ash that make breathing a hazard are being carried by the wind to South Korea, Japan and beyond.
Not enough of the Chinese emissions reach the United States to have an appreciable effect on acid rain yet. But, they are already having an effect in the mountains in West Coast states. These particles are dense enough that, at maximum levels during the spring, they account at higher altitudes for a fifth or more of the maximum levels of particles allowed by the latest federal air quality standards. Over the course of a year, Chinese pollution averages 10 to 15 percent of allowable levels of particles. The amounts are smaller for lower-lying cities, like Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
China is also the world's largest emitter of mercury, which has been linked to fetal and child development problems, said Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington.
Unless Chinese regulators become much more aggressive over the next few years, considerably more emissions could reach the United States. Chinese pollution is already starting to make it harder and more expensive for West Coast cities to meet stringent air quality standards, said Professor Cliff of the University of California, slowing four decades of progress toward cleaner air.
Nothing Beats It
China knows it has to do something about its dependence on coal.
The government has set one of the world's most ambitious targets for energy conservation: to cut the average amount of energy needed to produce each good or service by 20 percent over the next five years. But with an economy growing 10 percent a year and with energy consumption climbing even faster, a conservation target amounting to 3.7 percent a year does not keep pace.
All new cars, minivans and sport utility vehicles sold in China starting July 1 will have to meet fuel-economy standards stricter than those in the United States. New construction codes encourage the use of double-glazed windows to reduce air-conditioning and heating costs and high-tech light bulbs that produce more light with fewer watts.
Meanwhile, other sources of energy have problems. Oil is at about $70 a barrel. Natural gas is in short supply in most of China, and prices for imports of liquefied natural gas have more than doubled in the last three years. Environmental objections are slowing the construction of hydroelectric dams on China's few untamed rivers. Long construction times for nuclear power plants make them a poor solution to addressing blackouts and other power shortages now.
For the past three years, China has also been trying harder to develop other alternatives. State-owned power companies have been building enormous wind turbines up and down the coast. Chinese companies are also trying to develop geothermal energy, tapping the heat of underground rocks, and are researching solar power and ways to turn coal into diesel fuel. But all of these measures fall well short. Coal remains the obvious choice to continue supplying almost two-thirds of China's energy needs.
Choices and Consequences
China must make some difficult choices. So far, the nation has been making decisions that it hopes will lessen the health-damaging impact on its own country while sustaining economic growth as cheaply as possible. But those decisions will also add to the emissions that contribute to global warming.
The first big choice involves tackling sulfur dioxide. The government is now requiring that the smokestacks of all new coal-fired plants be fitted with devices long used in Western power plants to remove up to 95 percent of the sulfur. All existing coal-fired plants in China are supposed to have the devices installed by 2010.
While acknowledging that they have missed deadlines, Chinese officials insist they have the capacity now to install sulfur filters on every power plant smokestack. "I don't think there will be a problem reaching this target before 2010," said Liu Deyou, chief engineer at the Beijing SPC Environment Protection Tech Engineering Company, the sulfur-filter manufacturing arm of one of the five big, state-owned utilities.
Japan may be 1,000 miles east of Shanxi Province, but the Japanese government is so concerned about acid rain from China that it has agreed to lend $125 million to Shanxi. The money will help pay for desulfurization equipment for large, coal-fired steel plants in the provincial capital, Taiyuan.
The question is how much the state-owned power companies will actually use the pollution control equipment once it is installed. The equipment is costly to maintain and uses enormous amounts of electricity that could instead be sold to consumers. Moreover, regulated electricity tariffs offer little reward for them to run the equipment.
In 2002, the Chinese government vowed to cut sulfur emissions by 10 percent by 2005. Instead, they rose 27 percent. If Chinese officials act swiftly, sulfur emissions could be halved in the next couple of decades, power officials and academic experts say. But if China continues to do little, sulfur emissions could double, creating even more devastating health and environmental problems.
Even so, halving sulfur emissions has its own consequences: it would make global warming noticeable sooner.
China contributes one-sixth of the world's sulfur pollution. Together with the emissions from various other countries, those from China seem to offset more than one-third of the warming effect from manmade carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, according to several climate models.
But the sulfur particles typically drift to the ground in a week and stop reflecting much sunlight. Recent research suggests that it takes up to 10 years before a new coal-fired power plant has poured enough long-lasting carbon dioxide into the air to offset the cooling effect of the plant's weekly sulfur emissions.
Climate experts say that, ideally, China would cut emissions of sulfur and carbon dioxide at the same time. But they understand China's imperative to clean up sulfur more quickly because it has a far more immediate effect on health.
"It's sort of unethical to expect people not to clean up their air quality for the sake of the climate," said Tami Bond, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Hunt for Efficiency
The second big decision facing China lies in how efficiently the heat from burning coal is converted into electricity. The latest big power plants in Western countries are much more efficient. Their coal-heated steam at very high temperatures and pressures can generate 20 to 50 percent more kilowatts than older Chinese power plants, even as they eject the same carbon-dioxide emissions and potentially lower sulfur emissions.
China has limited the construction of small power plants, which are inefficient, and has required the use of somewhat higher steam temperatures and pressures. But Chinese officials say few new plants use the highest temperatures and pressures, which require costly imported equipment.
And Chinese power utilities are facing a squeeze. The government has kept electricity cheap, by international standards, to keep consumers happy. But this has made it hard for utilities to cover their costs, especially as world coal prices rise.
The government has tried to help by limiting what mines can charge utilities for coal. Mines have responded by shipping the lowest-quality, dirtiest, most-contaminated coal to power plants, say power and coal executives. The utilities have also been reluctant to spend on foreign equipment, steering contracts to affiliates instead.
"When you have a 1 percent or less profit," said Harley Seyedin, chief executive of the First Washington Group, owner of oil-fired power plants in Southeastern China's Guangdong Province, "you don't have the cash flow to invest or to expand in a reasonable way."
A New Technology
The third big choice involves whether to pulverize coal and then burn the powder, as is done now, or convert the coal into a gas and then burn the gas, in a process known as integrated gasification combined combustion, or I.G.C.C.
One advantage of this approach is that coal contaminants like mercury and sulfur can be easily filtered from the gas and disposed. Another advantage is that carbon dioxide can be separated from the emissions and pumped underground, although this technology remains unproven.
Leading climate scientists like this approach to dealing with China's rising coal consumption. "There's a whole range of things that can be done; we should try to deploy coal gasification," said Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations-affiliated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The World Bank in 2003 offered a $15 million grant from the Global Environment Facility to help China build its first state-of-the-art power plant to convert coal into a gas before burning it. The plan called for pumping combustion byproducts from the plant underground.
But the Chinese government put the plan on hold after bids to build the plant were higher than expected. Chinese officials have expressed an interest this spring in building five or six power plants with the new technology instead of just one. But they are in danger of losing the original grant if they do not take some action soon, said Zhao Jian-ping, the senior energy specialist in the Beijing office of the World Bank.
Another stumbling block has been that China wants foreign manufacturers to transfer technological secrets to Chinese rivals, instead of simply filling orders to import equipment, said Anil Terway, director of the East Asia energy division at the Asian Development Bank.
"The fact that they are keen to have the technologies along with the equipment is slowing things down," he said.
Andy Solem, vice president for China infrastructure at General Electric, a leading manufacturer of coal gasification equipment, said he believed that China would place orders in 2007 or 2008 for the construction of a series of these plants. But he said some technology transfer was unavoidable.
Western companies could help Chinese businesses take steps to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, like subsidizing the purchase of more efficient boilers. Some companies already have such programs in other countries, to offset the environmental consequences of their own carbon-dioxide emissions at home, and are looking at similar projects in China. But the scale of emissions in China to offset is enormous.
For all the worries about pollution from China, international climate experts are loath to criticize the country without pointing out that the average American still consumes more energy and is responsible for the release of 10 times as much carbon dioxide as the average Chinese. While China now generates more electricity from coal than does the United States, America's consumption of gasoline dwarfs China's, and burning gasoline also releases carbon dioxide.
An Insatiable Demand?
The Chinese are still far from achieving what has become the basic standard in the West. Urban elites who can afford condominiums are still a tiny fraction of China's population. But these urban elites are role models with a lifestyle sought by hundreds of millions of Chinese. Plush condos on sale in Shanghai are just a step toward an Americanized lifestyle that is becoming possible in the nation's showcase city.
Far from the Wu family in rural Shaanxi, the Lu Bei family grew up in cramped, one-room apartments in Shanghai. Now the couple own a large three-bedroom apartment in the city's futuristic Pudong financial district. They have two television sets, four air-conditioners, a microwave, a dishwasher, a washing machine and three computers. They also have high-speed Internet access.
"This is my bedroom," said Lu Bei, a 35-year-old insurance agency worker entering a spacious room with a king-size bed. "We moved here two years ago. We had a baby and wanted a decent place to live."
For millions of Chinese to live like the Lus with less damage to the environment, energy conservation is crucial. But curbing that usage would be impossible as long as China keeps energy prices low. Gasoline still costs $2 a gallon, for example, and electricity is similarly cheap for many users.
With Chinese leaders under constant pressure to create jobs for the millions of workers flooding from farms into cities each year, as well as the rapidly growing ranks of college graduates, there has been little enthusiasm for a change of strategy.
Indeed, China is using subsidies to make its energy even cheaper, a strategy that is not unfamiliar to Americans, said Kenneth Lieberthal, a China specialist at the University of Michigan. "They have done in many ways," he said, "what we have done."
Keith Bradsher reported from Hanjing and Guangzhou, China, for this article and David Barboza from Datong and Shanghai.
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Dear Readers, In recent months, I have posted my public writing to my free Substack. I have such fond memories of Google Blogspot, thus it deeply surprises me that Google's search engine does a terrible job in helping those who search to find past blog posts. This deeply surprises me. As I age, I'm trying to post more dignified material to my Substack. I am sticking to what I know based on my ongoing research in microeconomics. Thanks very much for reading my posts. Best Regards, Matthew E. Kahn
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I have moved my blog over to Substack (and I've lost many readers). Please join me there. Here is a recent column. The Wall Street Journal has published an important piece about how the high heat is reducing economic activity in Houston. The piece has a pessimistic tone that the heat melts the city’s infrastructure and shaves off economic activity as people don’t want to go outside. When microeconomists study consumer expenditure dynamics as people buy cars, go out to dinner and buy groceries. During hot spells, people are less likely to go out for dinner or to play multiple rounds of golf. A microeconomist would say that this evidence indicates that people have “state dependent preferences”. In English, this means that how much we enjoy a steak dinner at an outdoor restaurant depends on whether it is 75 degrees outside or 95 degrees outside (this is the “state of the world”). I certainly believe that hot and humid Houston is in a type of “macroeconomic Siesta” right now and this reduces economic activity. But, permit me to make some counter-points. #1 The money people in Houston do not spend on the hot July 28th 2023 is still in their bank account and they can spend it on a cooler November 5th 2023 day. Note this intertemporal substitution. The media focuses on the direct effect of the heat (that high heat is reducing economic activity today) but my counter-hypothesis is that it displaces expenditure to the future when it will be cooler later this year in Houston. So, will the New York Times write a piece saying that high summer heat causes a fall boom in Houston? I don’t think so. This type of cross-elasticity is ignored by the “climate crisis” focused media. #2 The WSJ interviewed a few people who want to leave Houston. As always, they are free to choose. As more workers can engage in WFH, those who hate the high heat will leave the city in summer. If they own a home, they can AirBNB it. WFH is a climate adaptation strategy as it makes people more geographically footloose. I discuss this in my 2022 book. #3 We have to live somewhere. Is Houston becoming more miserable to live in summer than other cities? If the answer is “yes”, then its home prices will fall. Here are some data from Zillow.Even with higher interest rates, I don’t see a collapse here in the Zillow index. Are you going to sell short Houston homes as your strategy to get rich? Incumbent home owners form a strong interest group to invest in adaptation strategies to protect their asset’s value. WHAT are possible adaptation strategies? #1 Road construction materials can be re-evaluated to reduce the urban heat island effect. Read this report. The City has strong incentives to embrace the cost-effective strategies discussed here. #2 Golf courses can open up part of the area and charge people to enter on hot days to use them as private parks. #3 Here are personal cooling strategies. On a personal level, of course the city needs access to strong air conditioning. Firms that make them and repair them will enjoy a boom. The Electricity GRID must remain reliable. The Climatopolis logic is that Houston competes with other cities to attract successful people and firms. The system of cities and the fear of brain drain gives Houston’s leaders and land owners strong incentives to be pro-active in adapting to climate change. Such efforts will be messy as there will be fights over who pays for such local public goods but the end result will be a more resilient Houston where the high heat causes less economic damage in the short term and medium term. This is the climate change adaptation hypothesis.
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The New Economic Geography of WFH Matthew E. Kahn Over the last three years, companies from all over the world have learned valuable information about how their firm’s productivity and worker satisfaction is affected when workers can engage in Work from Home (WFH) on at least a part-time basis. Each firm faces fundamental tradeoffs in not requiring workers to return full time to the office. On the one hand, WFH accommodates worker lifestyles and responsibilities at home. WFH workers gain from commuting less often and some may choose to live further from their place of work because they commute in on fewer days. Firms with happier workers are less likely to face retention challenges and will pay less retraining workers. Given that WFH is a non-taxed perk, firms that offer this job amenity can be less generous in giving workers pay raises. Firms located in expensive areas can economize on expensive commercial real estate. If a firm requires that workers be in the office just half the week, then a firm can reduce its space requirements by 50%! On the other hand, firms benefit from face to face communication. Younger workers gain more from such mentoring. Building up the firm’s culture and monitoring worker effort is easier to do if workers are on site. Each company has a strong incentive to experiment with different workplace practices to learn what works best for their organization. The pursuit of profit actually accelerates this learning process. Economists are always looking for new ways to study firm dynamics. The rise of the WFH economy opens up many questions related to what types of firms will encourage their workers to engage in WFH. Famous executives such as Elon Musk at Tesla and Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan have been encouraging workers to return to the office. Why? Up until now, a lack of data has hindered the systematic analysis of what types of firms prioritize allowing workers to engage in WFH on at least a part-time basis. The newly released Flex Index provides a unique opportunity for researchers. As an urban economist, I am especially interested in the geographic determinants of why different firms engage in hybrid-WFH. The Flex Index provides data on each firm’s headquarters’ location. I focus on those that are based in the United States. I use data for 2528 of them. For this set of firms, I merged in three geographic variables. The first variable is the Zillow Median Home Price Index. Zillow uses a repeat home price index methodology to create a standardized “apples to apples” measure of home prices that can be compared across cities at a point in time or within a given city over time. In the analysis I present below I use Zillow data from December 2022. The second variable I merge in to the Flex Index is the percent of voters in the Headquarters State that voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 Presidential Election. The third variable I merge in from the Zillow data base is the city’s size. So, New York City is the first ranked city in the nation because it is the largest city. I use these data to test two hypotheses; Hypothesis #1: All else equal, firms are more likely to engage in WFH work if home prices are higher in the HQ City. Hypothesis #2: All else equal, firms are more likely to engage in WFH in more Progressive states. To test these hypotheses, I use a linear multivariate regression framework. To standardize the firms, I include industry fixed effects (this variable is in the Flex Index database). The dependent variable is a dummy variable that equals one if the firm’s workers all work on site. In the database, 39% of the firms report having the workers work fully on site. Table One reports four regressions with each column reporting a separate regression. I use the regression output to test the hypotheses presented above. Main Results All else equal, firms are more likely to engage WFH work if home prices are higher in the Headquarter (HQ) City. Based on the results in columns (1) and (3), I find that for the full set of industries and for the Healthcare and Biotechnology industry that workers are more likely to be engaging in WFH if home prices are higher in the HQ’s city. Based on the results in column (2), a doubling of home prices is associated with a log(2)*-.088 = -.06 or a six percentage point reduction in workers working solely on site. This effect is even larger for the Health Care industry. For this subset of firms, a doubling of local home prices is associated with a 12.7 percentage point increase in WFH. For the other two industries, I fail to reject the hypothesis that firms are not more likely to allow workers to engage in WFH as a function of local home prices. All else equal, firms are more likely to engage in WFH in more Progressive states. The test of this hypothesis is based on the coefficient on the 2020 Joe Biden vote share. Across all four specifications presented in Table One, I find consistent evidence that firms are more likely to allow their workers to engage in WFH when the HQ is located in a more liberal state. A ten percentage point increase in Joe Biden’s vote share is associated with a 3 percentage point increase in the probability that a firm allows its workers to engage in WFH on at least a part-time basis. Conclusion The Flex Index is a terrific new data source that allows empirical researchers to study how different firms are incorporating WFH into their work routines. In my 2022 Going Remote book, I hypothesized that the rise of WFH would benefit workers in high home price areas. The evidence presented here supports this hypothesis. Here, I also find a Red State/Blue State divide such that firms located in Blue States are more likely to allow their workers to engage in WFH. Future research should explain why we observe this fact. Are such firms in progressive states more concerned about work/life balance and gender equality issues? There are many open questions that improved data access will allow for us to provide credible answers.
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A majority of American adults live in owner occupied housing. As an economist, I celebrate the logic of revealed preference. While many poor people are renters, many non-poor people reveal that the benefits of ownership exceed the costs. In this entry, I would like to delve into the details here. Up front, let me say that I don’t want to discuss the tax code and the nitty gritty of mortgage interest deductions, the GSEs, etc. Instead, I want to talk about why people gain life satisfaction from ownership and what are some of the hidden costs of ownership under our current “rules of the game”. As an urban economist, I want to contrast the private benefits to an adult of owning a home and the local social benefits conveyed to a community when it consists of home owners. Portfolio Risk from Home Ownership Let’s start with a personal example. Back in 2000, We purchased a home in Belmont, MA (a Boston suburb), we paid 1/2 in cash and got a loan for the rest. The cash we invested in the home had a next best alternative. We could have invested in a diversified portfolio of assets rather than making a place based bet. By buying this home, we were raising our migration costs for moving away from Boston and thus were losing some option value if the local economy performed worse than the rest of the nation. A strange feature of the housing market is that owners hold an undiversified portfolio. Imagine an alternative world where I could own 36% of my Belmont home and own 2% of 32 other homes scattered around the United States. This would be a more diversified portfolio. Of course there would be contracting issues in designing this contract. My friend and co-author Joe Tracy co-authored a MIT Press book on implementing these contracts. The Past Rate of Return on Housing for African-Americans In 2021, I released an NBER Working Paper where I use several data sets to make a simple point. Here is my paper’ abstract: “The racial and ethnic composition of home buyers varies across geographic locations. For example, Asians and Hispanics are much more likely to buy homes in California than Blacks and Blacks are more likely to buy homes in Georgia than other demographic groups. Home prices grow at different rates across geographic units such as counties or zip codes. Hedonic bundling inhibits buyers from purchasing shares of different homes and forming a spatially diversified housing portfolio. Spatial variation in purchases suggests that the average rate of return to housing varies across racial and ethnic groups. To test this claim, I construct a geographic shift-share index by combining Zillow geographic specific home price index data with HMDA micro data. The shift share calculations yield the average rate of return to home ownership by purchase year, and sale year for different demographic groups. Over the years 2007 to 2020, Blacks earned a lower rate of return on home purchases than Asians and Hispanics and the sample average. Within geographic areas, average loan differences across racial and ethnic groups are very small.” Let’s unpack this. Over the last 25 years, cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Portland, Seattle, San Jose, Malibu, and Santa Monica have boomed. None of these cities is known to be an African-American city. African-Americans tend to buy in other cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland and Detroit. What is going on here? (and of course I am telling an Average story —- LeBron James lives close to me in Los Angeles’s Brentwood). African-Americans on average have lower wealth than Whites and are less likely to be able to afford the down payment to buy housing in Superstar Cities. African-Americans are less likely to work in Tech than Whites and Asians and this reduces the likelihood that they are living in the major tech hubs. In the areas where African-Americans have ties, house prices have not appreciated much and this means that the AVERAGE African-American homeowner has earned a lower rate of return on housing over the last 25 years. Going forward (from 2023 to 2040) will Baltimore’s housing market outperform San Jose’s? This is possible. In my recent WFH Going Remote book, I present microeconomic arguments for why this is possible if Baltimore improves its quality of life. In closing this section, I want my readers thinking about opportunity cost. If an African-American family owns housing in Baltimore then that money is not invested in the SP500 stock market index. Opportunity cost for asset investments always exist. What About the Consumption Value of Home Ownership? When we teach Econ 101, we introduce our students to the utility function. This is the economist’s “thermometer” measuring how much pleasure we gain from different consumption bundles such as consuming beer or pizza. The consumer knows herself and knows her budget constraint and makes the right (affordable) consumption choice. Assuming people are consistent over time, we learn about their priorities from the choices they make as market prices and their income changes. With this preamble, why does home ownership raise one’s utility? One hypothesis is “pride of ownership”. But what do these words mean? Economists have struggled with modeling the demand for “status”. Economists have taken Veblen seriously and have sought tests of which subgroups of people seek to own and display luxury goods to signal that they are special. Here is a paper about cars and jewelry ownership. Of course, I understand the desire for status. I continue to submit papers to Top 5 journals and to track my Twitter Follower count! But, the point of this 1/2 joke is that there is an ever increasing number of strategies for producing “status”. As I age, I gain pride by reaching my Google Fit target of 10,000 steps a day. During my life time, I have lived in fancy rental housing in Manhattan, Singapore, and Baltimore. Given the changing demographics of our population, real estate suppliers will offer rental properties if there is demand. Don’t Renters Face Displacement Risk and Gentrification Risk? Yes, but if this is a serious concern then renters can sign longer term contracts up front. Scottie Pippen signed a 10 year contract with the Chicago Bulls at the start of his career because of his fear of injury. In a renter economy, there would be less support for local NIMBYism and real estate developers would build more housing and this would reduce rent rise risk. The ongoing conversion of commercial urban real estate into residential housing also reduces the likelihood of medium term rent spikes. I claim that it is time to visit this important paper by Todd and Nick. Sinai, Todd, and Nicholas S. Souleles. "Owner-occupied housing as a hedge against rent risk." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 120, no. 2 (2005): 763-789. Neighborhood Social Capital Boosts Due to Home Ownership? Ed Glaeser and Denise DiPasquale have posited a positive spillover that when real estate is owner occupied that the owner has the right incentives to maintain the property (to maintain the resale value) and to not free-ride in terms of neighborhood attributes such as safety and neighborhood greenness. Their empirical strategy in their applied research was to use panel data at the individual level and observe how the same person behaves before and after she becomes a home owner. A field experiment researcher would want to go a step further and randomly assign similar people at the baseline to renting versus owning and then observe how their home is treated and how their neighborhood’s quality of life changes over time. I greatly admire their work here but I want to be provocative and argue that their work is out of date due to technological change. I want to return to a paper by Baker, George P., and Thomas N. Hubbard. "Contractibility and asset ownership: On-board computers and governance in US trucking." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 119, no. 4 (2004): 1443-1479. These authors tell the following story. Back in the 1970s, truck drivers bringing stuff from California to Baltimore markets had private information about their routes and effort. The food company gave the truck driver a share of the profits to incentivize them to not shirk with respect to effort. The advent of cheap GPS computers meant that the food company could easily monitor the trucker and could now pay him a fixed wage. The same idea holds in 2023 for rental housing. The big data monitor era allows the property manager to have a very good sense of how the tenant is using the property and what is going on in the local neighborhood. If crime rises, the property manager can hire private guards. If litter increases, a crew can be hired to pick up the trash. Markets substitute for social capital and volunteering! Conclusion The modern Economy’s Big Data revolution and climate change risk both create incentives for more of us to be renters. Going forward if more of us are renters in the year 2040; then we gain the following adaptation benefits; #1; Our assets are less exposed to place based shocks (i.e Hurricane Ian), #2 we hold a real option to move away from areas that turn out to be at greater risk from shocks, #3 There is less lobbying for place based subsidies using national subsidies because “victims” have fewer place based assets at risk (i.e we are each holding a more diversified portfolio). If government steps back from insurance markets, the private sector will step up its game and insurance innovation will further spur the pace of climate change adaptation. If these ideas interest you, read my 2021 Yale Press book Adapting to Climate Change.
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Climate change adaptation refers to our individual and collective ability to cope with Mother Nature’s more intense weather punches in terms of extreme heat, drought, fire, flood and many other place based risks. My microeconomics research, as sketched out in my 2010 Climatopolis book and my 2021 Adapting to Climate Change books, argues that capitalism accelerates our ability to adapt as market price signals encourage substitution and innovation. Whether government policy complements the private sector muffles the private sector’s efforts continues to be a major research topic. In my 2010 Climatopolis book, I asked; “If Milton Friedman ran the U.S FEMA (and thus committed to no generous ex-post bailouts to shocked places) how much faster would adaptation occur?” In my ongoing empirical work, I continue to study how extreme weather affects our economy. I see evidence of adaptation progress as the “climate damage function” flattens and this means that the same punches thrown by Mother Nature cause less damage over time. My students are studying this hypothesis in the developing world and investigating what frictions (such as government policy) inhibit adaptation from taking place. An example would be government price supports for agriculture that create a moral hazard effect. See this 2015 paper set in the United States. My Thoughts About the Work by Two Talented New York Times Journalists The New York Times continues to be the paper of record. Two of the leading authors for the Times are Christopher Flavelle and David Wallace-Wells. I link to their work so you can read it on your own. David recently published a huge New York Times Magazine piece that you can read here. I want to keep this entry short but I plan to expand upon the themes I present below. I must acknowledge upfront that I have not interviewed either of them about their climate change adaptation pessimism. My points I present here are based on my reading of their work. How Does a “Climate “Crisis” Emerge? Global greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise. Read our 2022 NBER paper. We do not know how much global average temperatures will rise due to rising emissions and we do not know what “crazy” weather will emerge because of what we have collectively unleashed. In a series of case studies, Flavelle argues that we have built up billions of dollars of place based capital in increasingly risky areas such as Florida that face more severe disaster risk. He emphasizes the moral hazard effect that the expectation that there will be Federal Bailouts of struck areas encourages more rebuilding in these areas. So, he is telling a story that we do not learn from our mistakes. He does not explain who is the “adult in the room”? Why don’t city urban planners, the mortgage lending industry, the real estate development industry, the insurance industry adopt new “rules of the game” so that new real estate development is nudged to “higher ground” or if we build in risky places that private actors are incentivized to invest in pre-cautions that reduce the damage caused by the next storm. Starting with my Climatopolis book, I have argued that if people make place based bets (such as investing in Miami real estate), then they should flip two sided coins. They get to keep the upside appreciation if local prices rise but they also must “eat” the downside loss if local prices decline because of rising risk and better opportunities in other real estate markets such as Boston or Houston or Buffalo. I do respect his point that the public sector activism in insurance markets is causing an important free market distortion. As the social cost of this distortion rises, economic theory predicts that political reform will take place. Why should tax payers on “higher ground” bail out risk takers over and over again? Why reward “bad behavior”? As we saw with the economy’s reorganization during the COVID crisis of 2020, markets adapt and change when new news occurs if government does not distort price signals. The rise of the Zoom WFH experiment was an amazing example of adaptation. David Wallace-Wells argues that adaptation is costly and will exacerbate existing inequality. A quote “Talk enough about adaptation, and you drift into technical-seeming matters: Can new dikes be built, or the most vulnerable communities resettled? Can crop lands be moved, and new drought-resistant seeds developed? Can cooling infrastructure offset the risks of new heat extremes, and early warning systems protect human life from natural disaster? How much help can innovation be expected to provide in dealing with environmental challenges never seen before in human history? But perhaps the more profound questions are about distribution: Who gets those seeds? Who manages to build those dikes? Who is exposed when they fail or go unbuilt? And what is the fate of those most frontally assaulted by warming? The political discourse orbiting these issues is known loosely as “climate justice”: To what extent will climate change harden and deepen already unconscionable levels of global inequality, and to what degree can the countries of the global south engineer and exit from the already oppressive condition that the scholar Farhana Sultana has called “climate coloniality”?” These are great questions but note that these are economics questions. What is the quality adjusted price of the goods we need to continue to be safe, comfortable and healthy? David Wallace-Wells owns a computer and a cell phone. These products didn’t exist in 1940. Every day they grow cheaper and become of higher quality. This is what market competition does. More poor people in the developing world can afford these products as quality adjusted prices decline. Note that Wallace-Wells is rightly concerned with poverty and the challenges that poor people will face going forward. An economist would reply to his pessimism; “okay, you are not worried about Elon Musk’s ability to adapt to new risks. Let’s rank all of the world’s population with respect to their income. Who are the people who currently do not have the capacity to adapt to the serious challenges that wacky weather is posing? What income growth would give them the opportunity to adapt? Why isn’t this income growth occurring? “ Note that David Wallace-Wells is saying that economic growth in the developing world is the key to adapting to climate change. We need poverty alleviation to help everyone to be able to adapt. Here we agree. Economic growth is the key tool for adapting to climate change. Such economic growth reduces poverty. Here is a study of global poverty alleviation by a leading macro-economist. I recognize that I am positing that national economic growth reduces poverty. Is this a controversial claim?
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This has been a very hot summer. For every person on the planet, what is her willingness to pay to avoid this hot summer? So, on a day when it s 93 degrees on average --- how much is Sally in Seattle willing to pay for this day to have been 78 degrees instead?
In a "make versus buy" economy, one can either pay God to not face the 93 degree day in Seattle or one can use a suite of adaptation strategies to cope with the high heat. Basic economic logic teaches us that one's willingness to pay to avoid the heat is bounded by what it would cost you to adapt to the heat. This blog post focuses on the microeconomic determinants of adapting to the heat.
I will argue that at any point in time, this adaptation strategy set is almost infinite dimensional and that the dimensions of the adaptation strategy set grow over time so that it gets ever easier for us to adapt to the high heat. This means that our willingness to pay to avoid facing the extreme heat actually declines over time because it is getting cheaper for us to adapt on our own to the heat. In my 2021 Adapting to Climate Change book, I expand on this point that the Social Cost of Carbon can actually decline over time for many people as their adaptation choice set grows.
Let's start with the marginal cost curve that is familiar to anyone who has taken Econ 101.
Case #1: A firm produces pizza using a linear production function such that pizza=10*Labor and the price of Labor = 2 each.
Given the linear production function, the firm can always make one more pizza if it hires .1 workers. It costs $2 per worker so the marginal cost to the firm of producing an extra pizza =2*.1 = 20 cents and this is a constant function.
Case #2: A firm produces pizza using a concave production function such that pizza=10*square root of Labor and the price of labor is .4 each.
In this case the amount of labor needed to make a pizza can be expressed as = Pizza*Pizza/100 and the $ expenditure to purchase this labor equals Pizza*Pizza/25 . This mechanical marginal cost function is convex.
Given this definition of marginal cost, now let's turn to the marginal cost of avoiding heat. Consider a person in Spain today confronted with high heat where she currently lives and works. Here is her strategy set for adapting;
#1 Move to a cooler place (either outdoors or inside such as below ground). Such migration can be permanent or temporary in an economy featuring cross-city transportation services and AirBNB short term housing.
#2 seek out a shady place with a breeze
#3 turn on air conditioning or go to a public place with air conditioning, A theme in my 2010 Climatopolis book was that if an area is known to face rising summer heat then people will change their durables and their home and work place architecture to be better prepared for the heat. We are not passive victims!!
#4 wear lighter clothing
#5 use a damp towel
#6 drink water
#7 take a Siesta and stop working during the hottest hours
#8 Eat lightly
Each of these adaptation strategies has a financial cost and a time cost. As Gary Becker taught us the full price equals the financial cost + your wage*time cost. For example, migrating will require more time and for high value of time people, this will mean incurring a larger cost.
I will stop here but note the following. Taking permutations of these various options yields an almost infinite dimensional adaptation choice set. Modern climate economics assumes that this choice set is stationary. In truth, it expands on a daily basis as we make progress building higher quality durables such as housing and air conditioning units and as we retire older capital and install newer capital. Modern economics is weak on capital updating problem. John Rust wrote a famous bus engine replacement paper but climate economists haven't incorporated this logic into the updating of the spatial capital stock. My paper with Devin Bunten is one attempt to address this issue.
Once we acknowledge that we have an ever growing set of adaptation strategies that are becoming cheaper and cheaper to use then one becomes more optimistic about the ability of the rich and the poor to adapt to the new serious challenges we face.
One example of the rising permutations. More and more educated people now have the opportunity to engage in Work from Home. These individuals can now more easily take a Siesta on a hot day. This is an example of the permutations of the strategy set listed above.
My critique of modern climate economics is that so many researchers are content to estimate reduced form empirical regressions of the form;
Person i's suffering on day j in location q = constant + b*Extreme heat on day j in location q + U
and take "b" as a physics constant. Assume that "suffering" is measured by lost income and that this can be measured by the statistician.
"b" is an interesting reduced form parameter. It represents a slope that measures at a point in time how much suffering extreme heat has caused to the average person who lives at location q at day j.
My Point is that "b" is determined by all of the factors I discussed above. As society's innovation and urban planning continues; "b" converges to zero over time and this pace of "b" shrinking from a positive number towards zero over time is a measure of our adaptation progress.
I want to see more climate economists exploring the microeconomic determinants of when does "b" change over time and when does it remain constant. Government policies that distort adaptation decisions such as subsidies will likely turn out to be a major determinant of slowing down adaptation.
As the marginal costs of climate adaptation decline, simple economics predicts that more individuals and firms will engage in adaptation (as they compare the benefits to the costs of adaptation) and as they engage in such self protection, the empirical reduced form researcher will estimate climate damage functions showing an ever declining amount of damage caused by climate change.
The Climate Change adaptation literature needs to take basic microeconomic logic about rational choice more seriously and then we will make more progress understanding the pace of adaptation and the frictions that slow down adaptation.
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Is face to face interaction over-rated? I am not talking about participating in the service economy (i.e getting a haircut), romance, friends and family interaction. I am talking about workplace face to face interactions and the vaunted "Water Cooler" (WC).The cliche WC story has focused on serendipity and spontaneity that occurs when people casually chat about this and that. This is not "directed search".POINT #1; Pessimists claim that the rise of WFH-HYBRID work will tax the Water Cooler such that organizations will become less productive.Counter-Point: The pessimists forget what they learned about self-selection. Workers know themselves, they know when they want to be social and when they want to be left alone. Such workers also respond to incentives. If the boss says; "hey , let's get our creative juices flowing". Workers will respond and be charming and engage on those days.I claim that there is quantity and quality of F2F interactions. The lazy urban economics productivity literature implicitly assumed that F2F interactions are homogeneous and are just a question of their count. So, if you meet with me 1000 times; the probability we have a breakthrough is 10 times higher than if we only meet 100 times face to face. I reject this. Anyone who has met me knows that sharp diminishing returns kick in -- -in speaking with me!POINT #2; The Water Cooler is a pre-AI, pre-UBER entity. I am interested in directed search. UBER matches drivers and riders to achieve efficiency criteria. Why can't successful firms introduce a type of UBER AI matching to bring different workers together? Why can't a boss make some recommendations about such matching?Point #3 Given successful within firm AI matching of Water Cooler Workers, why do they have to meet at work? Is the firm afraid of romance? That would be a funny reason for the persistence of the office!Point #4; Pessimists claim that we will get into a bad Nash Equilibrium such that social workers will go to the office and discover nobody to chat with as everyone else will be engaging in WFH on that day. In this age of AI Matching, can this misallocation really persist?So, to summarize this blog post; The Quality versus Quantity tradeoff always exists. Organizations have strong incentives to experiment here to see how to maintain their productivity under different organizational rules. How firms adapt to the new opportunity created by WFH is fascinating.FINAL POINT: Note that I set up this blog post such that the spontaneous face to face interactions occur by workers who work at the same firm. In this case, there is a residual claimant who has an incentive to get the rules of engagement right.What happens when workers work at different firms but work in the same city? I doubt that spontaneous F2F is that important for these folks. There isn't that much time in the day. You might say that a Harvard economist and a MIT economist can have coffee and make research magic happen if they both go to work. I accept this example but this is a special example. Do Elon Musk's Tesla engineers hang out at the local bar looking to chat with engineers from other firms?Since urban and labor economists do not have a real understanding of the production function of knowledge firms , we don't understand how the time allocation equilibrium induced by WFH will evolve over time.Of course, I do think that small firms will want to agglomerate close to each other for Labor pooling reasons but this is distinct from the gains from F2F interaction.
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Millions of American workers engaged in Work from Home (WFH) during the pandemic. WFH helped us to adapt to the risk of disease contagion. Going forward, WFH will also helps us to adapt to the rising climate risks we now face. Given that global greenhouse gas emissions are likely to continue to rise as the world’s population and per-capita income grows faster than the decarbonization of the world economy (declining GHG emissions per dollar of GNP), the climate change challenge will grow more severe over time.New climate risk modelling firms such as First Street Foundation and Jupiter are mapping the risks of flooding and fire risk that every land parcel may face over the next decades. Of course, these science based models cannot offer certainty about emerging risks but they do play a “Paul Revere” role in educating both firms and workers about new place based climate risks. You can type in any residential address here and First Street Foundation reports the property's expected fire risk and flood risk for free! Going forward, more and more property buyers will "do their climate risk homework" before making a large $ investment in a property.Before 2020, only the super rich and senior citizens were “footloose” and able to move to an area solely based on its amenities (or on its absence of risk). The rise of WFH allows more and more American workers to live where they want to live as their daily commute to work is no longer looming over where they choose to live. In our recent past, the expectation that one would commute to work 5 days a week for 48 weeks a year pinned down a worker and her family to specific locations near the corporate headquarters.Perceptions and concerns about emerging climate risks will influence where workers choose to live. Those who are risk lovers will actually be attracted to risky areas because property prices will be lower there! For those WFH eligible workers who are risk averse, their menu of locational choices will expand as they can live further from where they work.While no two WFH workers are identical, climate change will influence their locational choices. For those WFH workers who are especially sensitive to air pollution, they will anticipate that elevated fire risk in the American West will create PM2.5 spikes during summer months. They will figure out how to avoid these areas at those times. For those WFH workers who are especially risk averse, they will be willing to pay more for housing in places where climate risk modelers predict that they face less risk. Those WFH workers with niche preferences for leisure and exercise will have increased opportunity to live where they can engage in their hobby and meet like minded people.As different workers choose their own best “climate niche”, this will improve their mental and physical health and raise their workplace productivity. Surveys of young people have documented extreme ecological anxiety. The ability to choose one’s own favorite location that will be likely to attract like minded people will help them to better cope in the face of the new risks we face.If WFH workers choose to cluster in relatively safer parts of the U.S that feature less extreme heat, less drought risk, less flood and fire risk then firms will have an incentive to locate their future HQ2s and HQ3s closer to these areas. Firms will benefit from lower turnover from less burnout and greater worker satisfaction. Firms that expect that workers will stay with the firm longer have a greater incentive to mentor and invest in such workers. Firms will use their corporate data on the location of their workforce and can use this information to decide where to open up HQ2s and HQ3s. An old idea in urban economics focuses on the “chicken and egg” issue of whether people go where the jobs are or whether jobs move to where the people are. In our emerging economy where more WFH are footloose, they will increasingly take into account the emerging climate risks and move to relatively higher quality of life areas. As firms see these spatial clusters, the leadership can open up HQ2s closer to these worker hubs to increase face to face interaction and to buildup the company’s corporate culture.Some worry that the rise of WFH is elitist. As new WFH clusters form in climate resilient places, there will be an increased local service sector demand. This creates a local multiplier effect. Well paid WFH workers will need local teachers living nearby, dentists, repair people, and there will be jobs in construction. This increased local labor demand in a relatively high quality of life area featuring lower rents than in the Superstar Cities offers new opportunities for non-WFH eligible workers.Today, more educated people are more likely to work in industries and occupations that are WFH “friendly”. If WFH facilitates adapting to climate change and facing less climate risk, then this creates an extra imperative for improving American education so that more young people can have the option to engage in WFH when they are older.Before 2020, America’s most productive places were located in areas that face emerging risks. There are worries about flooding in New York City and wildfire risk affecting the American West. WFH accommodates our diversity. Millions of workers will have the personal freedom to live where they want to live and this will reduce their stress during a time of rising risk.Matthew E. Kahn is the Provost Professor of Economics at USC and the author of the New Book Going Remote. This piece presents some ideas from his new book.A Postscript: Back in 2016, a prominent University of Chicago economist (who does not have a PHD from Chicago!) told me that snowstorms disrupt Chicago's productivity. I countered that I bet that he is even more productive on those days because he didn't go to work and nobody bugged him on such a day. He just looked at me. Flash forward to 2022 and I am even more confident about my 2016 comment. The WFH option is now available to more and more highly educated people and they can "reoptimize" when a day turns out to be nasty to still be able to "seize the day" and get work done. Of course a snowstorm can disrupt a dentist appointment but for more and more of the key tasks in the modern economy, these can be done "anywhere" and a footloose population will each make decentralized decisions for how to make the best of that day before the weather goes back to normal. The reduced form empirical researcher then observes that the same Chicago snowstorm causes less economic damage and this is the empirical benchmark test that adaptation is taking place! Mother Nature's punches cause less damage over time in an economy enjoying adaptation progress.
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I joined the USC Economics faculty in 2015 and Romain Ranciere also joined that year. Permit me to list the impressive scholars who have subsequently joined our faculty.
In July 2022, a star theorist will join our department as our newest hire.
USC fascinates many people. This list highlights that the hype about us is earned. Note that we continue to build up strength in micro theory, macro, econometrics and applied micro. A balanced, optimistic department.
The next piece of the jigsaw puzzle is to build up a PHD program that trains and places students to achieve their career goals.
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The Los Angeles Times rejected my piece that I present below. Of course, I'm trying to sell my new 2022 Going Remote book!!
The New New Geography of Jobs
LeBron James joined the Los Angeles Lakers in 2018. He wanted to live and work in Los Angeles. How many of us have compromised as we live in a place because our work is nearby?
Going forward, a silver lining of the pandemic is that more and more of us will have the option to live where we want to live as we engage in WFH on either a part-time or full time basis. How will this new freedom affect our quality of life?
More educated workers are more likely to be working in occupations and industries that are WFH “friendly”. While a surgeon cannot work from home, a book author can. More and more people have learned due to our experience we gained from the COVID lockdown that we can be quite productive while working at home.
WFH workers reduce their weekly commute time. The rise of WFH allows for staggered work hours removing many peak commuters off the roads. The typical WFH worker saves perhaps 5 hours a week in commute time. Will traffic speeds increase for everyone else? This depends on whether more drivers take non-work related trips when road speeds increase.
WFH workers will have increased freedom in their lives to exercise more, to spend more time with children, to participate in family chores and to co-ordinate their leisure time with their nearby neighbors and friends. This opens up the possibility of new civic engagement. On days when a child is sick or bad weather days, the WFH worker can be productive and caring while at home. This opportunity reduces one’s stress and improves one’s mental health.
In 2021 and 2022, economists have used U.S Postal Service change of address data to study migration patterns. We are already spreading out. People have been moving to the exurbs and bidding up home prices there. People will move to areas where they want to be now that they are “untethered” and can live where they want to live. People who love to ski will move to such areas. Those with an aging mother may move closer to her without facing the same labor market penalty as before the rise of WFH. The ability to seek out cheaper housing will allow families to achieve their goals. One economic study argued that when people live in larger housing that this causes them to have more children!
During this time of deep concern about inequality, will WFH be elitist such that those who are not WFH eligible will be left behind and housing will become unaffordable in areas far from the cities? While these are open questions, economic logic offers several insights. First, with the rise of new WFH communities, there will be a local demand for the service economy as construction workers, teachers and restaurants will be in demand. For those non-WFH workers with a taste for the area’s lifestyle, new opportunities will emerge. Second, home prices do not have to soar in the medium term if real estate developers are allowed to build new housing in these places that have plenty of land. American’s NIMBYism could be a key constraint on how the rise of WFH affects our nations’ geography.
Consider California. Our state is suffering from drought right now and features extremely high home prices. Farmers consume over 75% of the state’s water. If some farmland could be rezoned as suburban housing, then water consumption would decrease and the supply of affordable housing would increase as that land is converted into housing. The rise of WFH helps our state to adapt to climate change and to increase the supply of affordable housing!
Third, our cities feature many durable buildings. If many WFH workers “head for the hills”, this opens up new possibilities for those who want to live in a San Francisco or a Boston to find housing there. This possibility only grows if commercial real estate in these areas is converted into residential buildings.
In the medium term, the rise of WFH opens new opportunities for parents of young children. In the past, many women opted out of the workforce to raise children. WFH opens up the possibility of working part-time for one’s firm while the kids are young. A firm that anticipates this dynamic will continue to mentor such young female workers and this will close the gender earnings gap. In the past, women disproportionately entered fields such as being a pharmacist because of the job’s flexibility. WFH opens up the possibility of more flexibility and thus accommodates our diversity.
In the past, African Americans were under-represented in the Tech Sector. Relatively few African-Americans live in tech cities such as San Francisco and Seattle. Few tech companies have headquarters in Baltimore or Detroit. The rise of WFH raises the possibility of the “best of both worlds”. One can live in Baltimore and work and physically appear from time to time at Amazon HQ2 or a future HQ3. Such tech firms will be able to attract a more diverse workforce and depressed cities such as Baltimore will attract role models who boost the local tax base.
A “New” New Geography of Jobs is now emerging. Those firms that recognize this point will build a stronger, more diverse and more loyal workforce. Those places that compete to attract such workers will enjoy growth and an influx of new blood.’. A stronger America emerges as people can live where they want to live and change their schedules to meet their goals and responsibilities.
