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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The growth of the black middle class has created niche markets. Many cities are competing to attract minority households to spend their vacations there. This article highlights the scale externality effect that Joel Waldfogel has written about.

Forget crime, pollution, congestion or bad public schools, this article claims that rats represent NYC's biggest quality of life nemisis. If garbage could be disposed of in an orderly fashion, then rats would have less to eat.

The article engages in some empirical trends analysis.

Today's New York Times Magazine posed an interesting question asking whether immigration surges help to reduce urban crime. The "conventional wisdom" is that immigrant enclaves feature gangs and illegal residents who contribute to urban mean streets. This article argues the opposite.

Now this is an interesting New York Times piece! It's not about Iraq, or income inequality or executive pay. Instead, it is a glimpse at how the Supreme Court engages in marginal analysis.

It may not be the David Letterman Top Ten list or the New York Times Book Review's top 15 list, but I'll take it! I salute Planetizen for its good job judgment and I'm glad they liked my new book.

"Planetizen is pleased to release its sixth annual list of the ten best books in the planning field.

Logical consistency has never been one of my strengths. Today, I wanted to blog about three different unrelated items.

Time is our scarce commodity. Have you wondered where the time goes? This e-mail below offers an answer. Would you fill out their survey? I think I will.

Given the importance of cities in the modern economy, it is surprising how little academic blogging there is focused on cities. There seem to be zillions of environmental blogs but few urban blogs.

New York City is wrestling with the question of how to increase its supply of land that can be developed. As this article below stresses, brownfields offer one source of land that can be revitalized.

The Stern Report has generated world wide headlines. A leading economist argues that climate change will be quite costly perhaps costing us 5% of world GNP each year in the future.

“Most economics departments are like country clubs,” said James J. Heckman, a Chicago faculty member and Nobel laureate. “But at Chicago you are only as good as your last paper.” This quote is from Milton Friedman's obituary in today's New York Times.

I entered the University of Chicago’s PHD program in Economics in the fall of 1988. Milton Friedman had moved west more than ten before that. His ongoing impact on that Department was clearly visible in the subject matter taught by Gary Becker, Sherwin Rosen, and Bob Lucas.

Don't ask how I found the story I reprint below. Another guy named Matt Kahn who currently lives in Los Angeles was assaulted as he made the mistake of supplying replacement workers in the middle of strike. The "law of small numbers" claims that we are not good bayesians.

Below, I report a concise punchy editorial in today's Harvard Crimson. The unsigned authors are pretty good economists thinking through different policies and their likely cost effectiveness. This editorial raises the bigger issue of adoption of greenhouse gas policies by Universities in general.

Apparently, we don't get paid for blogging! So, I've sat down and written some new academic stuff. This blog entry is a paid advertisement to tell you about these exciting two new papers available at www.ssrn.com.

I'm getting ready to move to Los Angeles and I don't drive. Apparently, I'm in the minority here.

The last chapter of my Green Cities book discusses climate change and cities. Surprisingly, there has been relatively little work on this subject. As I discuss below, there are 2 questions here.

Bloggers have had a lot to say about this recent election. Despite all of this brilliant chatter, I haven't been able to find any discussion of what a Democratic House and Senate mean for U.S environmental policy for the next two years.

Below I reprint an interesting article suggesting that there is a market failure in LDC cities. Urbanites in these cities demand clean toliets but a good sanitation system is costly. Wall Street has plenty of capital to lend out for good projects that pay a rate of return.

When I was a student at the LSE during the 1986-1987 year, I often read the London Guardian newspaper. Thus, I was happy to find out today that my piece for the Policy Exchange titled "Green Growth: The Economics of Green Cities" was reported on in their newspaper today.

Yesterday I gave an applied micro seminar at Penn State. I had a great time. My only complaint was that I had to take 4 flights to get from Boston to State College and return. Now I'm trying to catch up with all of the excitement and I teach in 1 hour.

Below, I report some recent research on the weather. Estimating climate change's consequences is both important and difficult. The Freakonomics column presented below sketches an intriguing paper by Deschenes and Greenstone.

In late February 2007, Resources for the Future will hold a conference with the impressive title "Frontiers of Environmental Economics". What will this conference be about? I won't be around to find out. I'll be in the sun at UCLA but still I'm curious.

Extrapolation is always fun stuff and makes for great headlines. But, rising demand for fish, the absence of Ocean private property rights and technological advance (i.e boats that can extract more fish per hour) all combine to potentially exhaust the fish supply.

Economists celebrate Tiebout sorting. A heterogeneous population "votes with their feet" and like minded people cluster into more homogenous sub-communities. So Berkeley and Cambridge attract more liberals and environmentalists than other towns.