Environmental and Urban Economics

People seem to respond to financial incentives so let's pay the poor for getting medical checkups, atteding parent-teacher conferences and getting a job. That's what New York City is about to do. Will this program be effective? Will it have unintended consequences? At a minimum, it will allow some social scientist to write a nice evaluation study. Will the poor move to New York City to qualify for this program? They would need to find an expensive apartment.

We know that such incentives for the poor are in vogue.

Economists such as Roland Fryer (http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/projects.html) are running experiments to see if student performance improves if they are provided with different short run incentives.

UCLA plays good basketball and great social science. In today's New York Times, my colleague Don Shoup makes the plausible case that properly pricing scarce resources (urban parking) could offer many big city "green" benefits. Don has convinced me. His basic story revolves around cheap guys like me circling different blocks searching for a meter parking spot. In this process, we congest the roads, pollute the air and waste our time. A more efficient solution would be market prices for parking.

What grosses you out? Why does it? Do you simply state that you derive negative utility from something? Buy why? Researchers at UCLA offer some answers.

Ewwwww!

UCLA Anthropologist Studies Evolution’s Disgusting Side

Behind every wave of disgust that comes your way may be a biological imperative much greater than the urge to lose your lunch, according to a growing body of research by a UCLA anthropologist.

In the April 2nd 2007 issue of the New Republic, Noam Scheiber has written a long piece titled "Freaks and Geeks". All academic economists should read this piece because it raises a host of issues concerning where academic economics is going.

Admissions officers at elite schools have a hard job. Usually, economists model people as if they solve calculus problems. We have taught generations of students that consumer choices in markets can be modeled as if a person maximizes utility subject to a budget constraint where the consumer knows her utility function and knows how market goods affect her utility (so cake directly makes you happy but it also makes you fat and you recognize these tradeoffs in making your best choice).

This is an interesting case study highlighting how a specific geographical area has been affected by recent climate patterns. In this town in Southern Arizona, the temperature is rising and this has triggered fires and bug invasions.

This New York Times article hints at an evil trend suggesting that unsuspecting new Sun Belt migrants are locating in fire zones and are at risk to burn in their houses as new fires erupt from heat and wild land.

People seem to believe that social scientists can estimate treatment effects. Is day care "bad" for children? This New York Times article seems to say that "yes, a little bit" based on a giant expensive study. It doesn't appear that there was any random assignment of childrent into different treatments so maybe we should think a little bit about the selection process of how parents choose a "treatment" for their precious children.

The New York Times has discovered an arbitrage opportunity in Los Angeles real estate and was kind enough to report about it in today's paper. I hope the business section begins offering stock tips! This booster article focuses on the "low" prices in the NELA area of Los Angeles and the easy access to downtown but for some strange reason it doesn't discuss the disadvantages of living in this general area.

I have some questions;

1.

Are you as "virtuous" as this family? A year without toliet paper? It would be interesting to have a real doctor examine this family to look at their physical health at the end of their experiment.

Why do cities exist? In this Internet age, why do they continue to exist? Probably, so we can step in each other's dog poop and smell other people's cigar smoke? Perhaps, there are gains to trade that are facilitated by being in tight proximity that overcome the annoying noise, smoke and foulness of cities?

The NBER has invested some $ to try to test some new hypotheses concerning the causes and consequences of agglomeration.