Environmental and Urban Economics

Several sets of economists have written papers on the unintended consequences of the Endangered Species Act . These papers document that land owners crush the "natural capital" before the Act seizes (without compensation) their land. This preemption protects the land owner but depletes the environment. Today the New York Times documents that this same dynamic is playing out in New York City. Land owners who want to demolish an old building to build a "Don Trump" like tower anticipate that the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission may designate their property as a historic landmark. Land Owners lose development rights when this occurs (just like with the Endangered Species Act) and respond to this by demolishing the building early so that there is nothing left to preserve.

Around UCLA, there are some very successful people living and working nearby. Some are connected to the "Hollywood" industry. Rick Byrd is one of them. He has played a key role on Alter Eco on TV with his buddy Adrian Grenier. On Wednesday, Rick gave a talk at UCLA. One of my students arranged his visit. He gave a great talk blending humor, business wisdom and his vision of how to market green products to a wider range of people than merely "hippies".

Obama is hiring but other demanders of academic economists' efforts are substituting to some other input. This new webpage clearly signals that there are many schools who expected that they could hire new blood who then received the "new news" from the Deans that their search would not be authorized.

Real Business Cycle theory would say that this is a great time for us to play some golf and watch some NFL football (leisure).

Do recessions have a "chilling" effect on reallocating resources towards more productive sectors of the economy? Or because the opportunity cost is low, recessions are the exact right time for key reallocations? This has been a topic of esoteric macro (see http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/138) but now this issues has arisen in environmental policy.

California is the green guinea pig. We are setting the climate change mitigation agenda. AB32 is the key piece of legislation attempting to sharply reduce this state's greenhouse gas emissions. Economists are now debating what are likely to be the "macro state wide" impacts of this regulation.

I recently participated in this debate over how we conduct ex-ante evaluation of a policy that hasn't been implemented yet.

There are a large number of papers making cross-national comparisons. Can we compare these apples to the oranges? Is the U.S still richer than China? Is the gap narrowing? This may be an important paper http://www.nber.org/papers/w14499.

Understanding PPPs and PPP-based national accounts

Angus Deaton, Alan Heston

NBER Working Paper No.

I woke up at 520am this morning and jumped into a 6am cab. I knew the street address in West Hollywood where the recording studio is and I assumed that it would be a commercial building. To my surprise, the cab pulled up in front of a nice house on a residential block. A Mercedes was parked in the driveway.

I will make my NPR Radio Debut tomorrow morning. Wish me luck. Our general topic area will be President Obama's New Green Deal. Are recessions the right time to make fundamental changes to our economy's infrastructure? Have you noticed the full page ads in the New York Times taken out by IBM lobbying pretty convincingly for the need for a "Smart Energy Grid"? Can such large infrastructure projects be provided by the private sector? This seems unlikely.

Shock therapy is back.

President-Elect Obama must be concerned for Detroit's car makers and their workers. Today's New York Times has a "devil's advocate's" article about the benefits of bankruptcy based on the steel industry's experience. Recall that Rust Belt cities such as Pittsburgh were major steel makers. This created well paying unionized jobs, profit and pollution.