Environmental and Urban Economics

Great things are expected from great people and Great ideas are expected from great institutions. Harvard is raising the stakes here promising to deliver a new global climate treaty in return for a payment of $750,000 per year. The authors of this new treaty will need to have a subtle understanding of the political economy of interest group competition in each nation.

Have you ever wondered whether your work is getting better over time? I'd like to believe that my research is getting better, but how do you test this optimistic claim? One method would be to look at where the work is appearing. I will have a paper in the next American Economic Review (joint with my favorite co-author).

Another empirical test is to go back and read your early work.

Last week as I cleaned out my Boston house, I found an old floppy disk.

I've always been interested in differential sentencing for the same crime. Here is an example of an academic study investigating this;

Sentencing in Homicide Cases and the Role of Vengeance

Author(s) Edward L.

At the NBER Summer Institute meetings, one has the opportunity to talk and talk and talk some more. Now that I'm back in Los Angeles, I'm resting my voice after a lot of talking. I talked to people at the Environmental meetings, the labor meetings, the innovation meetings, and the real estate meetings. That's a lot of meetings.

I had an interesting talk with a leading education economist.

Renewable Energy will require some land for wind turbines, solar panels and the like.

A Forbes editor was kind enough to tell me that it's "old news" that the greeness of older U.S center cities such as Boston, New York and Chicago is on the rise after decades of offering an environmental gross out. My point didn't merit publication in their "On My Mind" section.

Paris is providing 10,000 bikes to help ease traffic congestion. Are you optimistic that this "treatment" will work? Will it scale up if the government then provides 1 million bikes? I'd like to know how many nasty, cold rainy days does Paris typically experience?

This German case study sketches another problem that sometimes arises on public transit. Now, when I lived in Boston and commuted by the #96 bus and the #73 bus --- this never happened.

Tomorrow, my wife and I fly back to Boston for the first time in 8 months. We will be cleaning up our house to prepare to move out of it and attending some NBER Summer Institute conferences. I will not be blogging for the next 10 days. Since this activity is not addictive, I'm not worried about going "cold turkey".

Do I miss the humid Boston summer? I will soon find out. We never did bother to get central air conditioning built into our home because we were never in Boston in the summers.

What share of consumers really think about the "global consequences" of their purchases? Do consumers want to feel a "warm glow" about doing the right thing regardless of the true impacts caused by the product they choose?

The New York Times offers a review of the new Lexus. Ulrich does not seem to be convinced that this is a "green car". He points out that this hybrid Lexus has a worse fuel economy rating than many conventional Mercedes.