Environmental and Urban Economics

I serve on the board of editors of Regional Science and Urban Economics. Papers published in RSUE are usually quite good but they rarely make the national news. The Mankiw and Weil paper from long ago arguing that the aging of the baby boomers would lead to falling home prices was an exception.

Will the current banking chaos reduce innovation in the green tech sector such as solar panels and hydrogen cars? Is there a new green technology that would have been developed sooner had the current financial crisis not taken place? Some in California are making claims that there are new startup fi

I spent the morning at the Beverly Hills Hotel attending the Milken Institute's "State of the State".

Tomorrow I will attend the morning sessions of the Milken Institute's Big Annual Conference: California: The State of the State . Can professors sit quietly and learn? I doubt it.

Are you Against Intellectual Monopoly? UCLA has some new patents to offer to the world; New Intellectual Property from UCLA . It looks like the Economics Department is under-represented on the patent page.

I tried to do a google search on patents held by economists but I have failed.

This theme that Al Gore is a carbon hypocrite seems to work people up. Last year, people seized upon the facts that his big houses used a lot of electricity relative to Joe Plummer. Now they are talking about Big Al's love of bacon.

Funny stuff, he should read Dan O'Flaherty's City Economics at least twice.

Confessions of a Radical White Gentrifier

By Andrew Lyubarsky

http://www.columbiaspectator.com/node/56396

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 23, 2008

On paper, it seems like I’ve done everything right.

My parents have signed me up for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. I guess that they believe that a tenured professor should be a well read intellectual. While I prefer to write rather than read, I do read these things and sometimes actually learn.

This would be a great year to hire new faculty. Even the richest universities are feeling the pain. The wise Dean would use endowment income to hire this year. I know that the UCLA Deans are wise and will follow my advise.

Under what scenarios is investment in renewable energy a bad (ex-post) investment? Falling prices for fossil fuels don't help.

In today's New York Times Business section there is a short article on page D2 about a new study arguing that California Energy Efficiency Regulation creates jobs . To my surprise the article didn't provide a link to the real academic study.

Are there too many edited volumes in academic economics? Does their existence increase or decrease the stock of academic knowledge? There appears to be an uncountable number of them being written and published at any point in time.

Ed Glaeser's New York Times Blog Entry

Will the new Nobel Laureate receive more words from the Times on the OP-ED page? Will he leave them to write for the NY Post?

While I know that it is bad form to recycle old blog posts, please take a look at

My Krugman Pick in 2007 I saw the future but was a year early.

Bob Blumenfield is seeking to be elected to the California State Assembly (AD #40). I went to High School with Bob 25 years ago. This last sentence doesn't sound good to a "young guy" like me but it is true.

I will be at Legoland this weekend. I'm hoping the food and the toliets are made of lego. How can you believe that capitalism is washed up when we have efforts like:

http://www.legoland.com/california.htm?

Unfortunately, I will miss out on the exciting opportunity sketched below.

It's a slipperly slope but Casey Mulligan has taken the first step to writing for a broader audience.

Jim Heckman gave a rousing talk at UCLA today. There were only 250 slides in his presentation but he managed to show us all of them a couple of times as he toggled back and forth. In a nutshell, Jim is arguing that for too long we have all be too preoccupied with IQ.

Does history repeat itself? Chairman Ben is determined to not repeat 1929 but what is the probability that a depression would occur if he followed Casey Mulligan's advice? Does the Chairman base his decisions on expected utility? I would like to see him write out his "state tree" concerning the prob

The NewYorker Magazine is more than wacky cartoons. Here is a serious piece about global free trade's environmental consequences when some nations have corrupt governments ( Magazine Article on deforestation in Russia and Chinese wood product exports to Walmart ).

We don't have a TV and nobody invited me to watch the debates at their house. We don't have friends. So, this morning I've been reading the debate

transcripts . A prominent economist told me that Palin made a number of wise comments about global warming.

I've been burned twice in two days in market transactions. Maybe my Chicago PHD should be revoked? Now, these weren't large Wall Street transactions. I'm talking about a pint of milk and a purchase of an oreo and a cup of coffee but I believe that this story has a point.