Environmental and Urban Economics

Many economists believe that Cambridge, MA is the center of the universe. I have lived there or within 2 miles of there for 8 years of my post-PHD life. I have a pretty good sense of the intellectual benefits of being located in the 02138 zip code.

But, I'm now in California and I'd like to praise a few things I like about California that Cambridge can't match.

1. Outdoor exercise every day of the year. I was outside for 3 hours today and could have spent longer outdoors. I find that research ideas and exercise go together. I don't move at high enough speed for my ideas to be crowded out by a beating heart.

2. A well functioning Department of Motor Vehicles. My wife and I need California ID cards. I was worried that we would lose 3 hours at the notorious DMV.

Apparently, there is no free lunch? In the New York suburbs, people are investing in wood fired boilers to reduce their dependence on foreign oil. Unfortunately, these wood heating sources create plenty of particulates and a huge public health literature has documented that particulates kill.

So, this New York Times article is an interesting case of externality mitigation. In a densely populated suburb, there may be many "victims" living close to the guy with the wood fired boiler.

Bill Testa has a very interesting blog entry on the implicit "merger" of Chicago and Milwaukee into one big "super-metropolitan area" (see

http://midwest.chicagofedblogs.org/archives/2006/12/a_chicagomilwau_1.html)

We see this in many settings. In Southern California, Los Angeles, Riverside and Northern San Diego are forming one super CMSA. The New York City "metro area" covers New York City and big pieces of New Jersey, CT.

Job suburbanization is the key force here.

Does a blog's content depend on where a person lives and works? If so, then this blog is about to change. On saturday, I move west; way west. We'll see if the absence of cold winter, Boston accents and the New England Patriots improves this blog. I expect that once I'm set up at UCLA that I'll have a lot more to say about Los Angeles urban politics. In terms of urban politics, Boston is a boring town. It doesn't appear to me that Boston's Mayor faces any real stark policy decisions.

Now this is a forward looking Mayor! A cynic might ask why a mayor who can't run for re-election again would care about the environmental health of New York City 24 years from now in the year 2030. A moral philospher might state that the mayor is altruistic and cares about future generations. An economist would point out that the Mayor owns some expensive land in the fancy part of New York City and this land will be more valuable if NYC remains a "Green City" into the future.

This editorial presented below does a pretty good job of discussing the benefits of the status quo and thinking through who is the "marginal" student who was denied their place in the Harvard undergraduate class. I can't say that I have a big stake in this fight. I was married at Harvard and taught there from 1996 to 1998. It is certainly an excellent university but there are other excellent universities.

Could computers and data bases be the key to reducing a city's ecological footprint? This Times article provides details about the inability of New York City's government to have a record keeping system to keep straight who is using how much water. If consumers anticipate that they won't be billed for resource consumption, then this is effectively a price of zero and demand curves do slope down!

Here's a counter-factual for you.

Boston Globe

MASS. APPEALS | ADVICE FOR THE NEW GOVERNOR | EDWARD L. GLAESER

Free roads are anything but free

By Edward L. Glaeser | December 11, 2006

THE DEBATE over removing tolls on the Western Turnpike shows this state at its worst. Before the election, Governor Mitt Romney's administration engineered a proposal to eliminate tolls west of Route 128. The proposal's fans sell it as a tiny windfall for western Massachusetts.

Incentives seem to matter in many settings. Jonathan Leape of the LSE has written a very nice paper on the London Congestion Charge for the Journal of Economic Perspectives. This paper goes into detail about the challenges of implementing a central london congestion charge including the nitty gritty details of enforcement. He also provides some "before/after" facts concerning the impact of the program and discusses the charge's unintended consequences.

Patricia Beeson and Werner Troesken provide some historical perspective on our post 9/11/2001 world by looking at how cities coped in the past with crisis.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w12636

When Bioterrorism Was No Big Deal

Patricia E. Beeson, Werner Troesken

NBER Working Paper No. 12636

Issued in October 2006

NBER Program(s): DAE HC

The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of papers like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.