Environmental and Urban Economics

I'm writing a paper about trends in big city quality of life. How much is crime, pollution and congestion in big cities improving relative to smaller cities? Why is exposure to crime, pollution and congestion declining in big cities? A mildly interesting issue is whether people's subjective perceptions quickly converge and match the objective progress. Put simply, do people who live outside of New York City still view it as a tough, rough town based on trends in the 1970s and 1980s (i.e think of the Son of Sam)? How long does it take these slow Bayesians to update their information?

This interesting New York Times article highlights that NYC wants to be proactive and to fight outdated stereotypes by hiring a Madison Avenue Ad guy to "get the word" out about how great NYC is.

Many celebrities live in Malibu. I didn't see any of them today but I now have a better understanding of why they live there. On a traffic free sunday, Malibu is a 35 minute drive from UCLA. UCLA is close to everything. On a map of Los Angeles, Malibu is way North and West of anything. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I thought it would be funky like Santa Monica and would have classy restaurants and stores like Pacific Palisades. That's not what I saw.

The New York Times today is filled with interesting green news. Paul Krugman's piece presents an interesting fact that California's per-capita energy consumption is 40% below the national average. He argues that higher energy prices are the cause. He presents a nice "double difference" arguing that California's energy consumption was the same as the rest of the nation when its energy prices were as low as the rest of the nation's 30 years ago.

Have you ever wondered what anthropologists do all day long? When I meet faculty from other departments, I often ask myself this question. What do you do? What is the hard part of your research job? Below, this post will reveal the answer for one set of social scientists.

This is interesting on a couple of different levels. Can you figure out what I mean?

L.A.

I had thought that the recent efforts by economists such as Krugman, Sachs, Glaeser and Levitt had raised the economics profession's overall profile. The New York Times has also been devoting more coverage to describing who is "hot" in academic economics. But, these "treatments" appear not to have changed the overall pecking order. This Chicago based website's ranking would suggest that as usual that I am wrong.

I apologize. I have stopped blogging for a while because I've been busy. Maybe I'm slowing down and have no more ideas to share? Maybe it is too sunny here in Los Angeles?

But, I'm always looking for something to get me excited about my work and today I have found it.

When hurricane katrina hit, I predicted that New Orleans' durable housing stock would survive but would become a poverty magnet as predicted in the model published in the JPE in 2005 by Glaeser and Gyourko.

The article below focuses on selective out-migration from New Orleans. The more educated are always more spatially mobile. As moldy nasty housing survives, a housing filtering model would say that rents will fall.

Burried in today's New York Times Real Estate section is an interesting case study of the rate of return to real estate investment in New York City's fancy upper east side. An investor has purchased an empty lot for $8 million. She plans to invest $5 million to build a 8,000 square foot mansion and then she claims that she will sell the finaly product in 1.5 years for $25 million! That's a pretty good rate of return.

My grandfather turned 95 today. His sister lived to age 95. What was in the Polish drinking water from their youth? Relatively few blogs written by economists talk about their families. Maybe the families are boring? Or maybe the opposite? Could the family be so strange that we want to hide the family secrets from our academic friends and rivals?

My grandfather was a shoe salesman. He was a high energy, charming guy who could talk anybody into buying another pair of shoes.

Does Representative Henry Waxman have consistent legislative preferences? Here is a passage from the great book "Mega-Cities",

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