Environmental and Urban Economics

Should 100% of Berkeley employment away from the University be at Starbucks and Chez Panisse? If you say no, then what should the economy diversify into? One answer to this question would be to trust free market forces and allocate land to the highest bidder. Berkeley doesn't work this way.

In California, it has been claimed that AB32 will not only help California to mitigate its greenhouse gases but that it will also create new jobs. I like this optimism but the skeptic inside me would like to see some good research on the role of environmental regulation as job creator.

I don't know Ben Bernanke but he doesn't seem to care much for guys like me. I'm a renter and taxpayer. I would like to see him and Rick Miskin explain in a press conference why home owners need to bailed out and protected from the loans whose terms they chose to accept.

Have other bloggers wondered how random websurfers find their webpage? At google, if you type "urban economics" you will pretty quickly get pointed to my webpage. If you type "environmental economics" it takes a little bit more work to find me.

Despite Big Ben B's best efforts, we may be slipping into a recession. One way to increase national economic output is to increase the effective time that our workers are working.

UCLA researchers in our sociology department have generated a series of interesting facts about Mexican American assimilation. I'm not sure if they have nailed the causal mechanisms here but first steps first.

Apparently, immigration will continue to be a hot policy subject.

Harvard Law School has announced that it will waive the 3rd year of its tuition (a short term savings of $40 grand) for people who promise that they will enter public service for at least 5 years. Some question: who will take this offer? Liberal students will be more likely to accept this deal.

Tomorrow's Wall Street Journal OnLine Econoblog will offer some excitement. Before I turn to Tuscaloosa, I want to mention real estate prices at the Venice Canals in Los Angeles. Yesterday, we toured a $2 million home whose entire lot was 2,000 square feet.

UCLA has a healthy rivalry with UC Berkeley. We can beat them at basketball but can we beat them at economics? In a recent piece, David Warsh seems to think so. He is worried that UC Berkeley may soon be exporting some talent to the rest of the country.

If you need some excitement in your life, take a look at tomorrow's Wall Street Journal Online's Econoblog. Hopefully, Jim Brander and I had an engaging enough debate on the "limits to growth" to merit publication. Would Julian Simon be proud of me? I doubt it but you judge.

Like everybody else, universities face tradeoffs and must prioritize their goals. This article below from Columbia University's student newspaper highlights the issue. Columbia wants to be Harvard.

An old "Chicken and Egg" issue is whether economic development leads to higher quality government (measured in public goods provision per dollar of tax receipts) or do nations with higher quality governmental institutions enjoy greater development?

Here is an Andrei Shleifer piece that I've always

What is in your urban water? How many parts per trillion of sex hormones and other people's pep pills is enough to affect you and your kids? The Associate Press has gone undercover to engage in some old fashion muckraking.

Suppose that Al Gore was elected benevolent planner. His problem would be to minimize our aggregate greenhouse gas production by assigning all 300 million Americans where to live within the United States.

Real Estate economists are in deep thought about the costs of producing new housing. This is progress! When I was a graduate student, I had trouble thinking about what was the true cost function for producing any good in the economy.

Stanford University is offering an interesting "natural experiment" to test whether introducing new green buildings on campus causes beneficial outcomes such as reduced energy consumption, greater worker productivity, increased social interaction between sustainability scholars.

I've reached the stage of my career where I now write book reviews. No papers, no books, no grant proposals, I sit in my Rocking chair, with a pipe and a Sherlock Holmes hat and write reviews like the one I present below. I'm kidding but I did write this review.

While I toil away on generating some regression output on my new Green Cities paper and start to write final exam questions, my son has made his national TV debut. See if you can spot him during his milisecond cameo here: A Kahn's TV Debut

I'll give you a hint.

I have always worked on applied micro themes at the intersection of environmental and urban economics.