Environmental and Urban Economics

Given the impending UC 8% pay cut (and some talk that faculty who are well paid should volunteer to take a 10% or 12% pay cut), I've been thinking about going on my own Wildcat strike. That's why I stopped blogging for 10 days.

I used my time away from blogging to attend the UCEI Energy Camp at Berkeley. This summer conference brings together some of the best people doing work at the intersection of energy/IO/environmental topics. I had a great time and it was good to see my old friends, co-authors and future co-authors. I even learned some economics.

While in Berkeley at my in-laws' house, I sat down and took pages of notes on a variety of projects that I'm working on. This helped me to "recharge my batteries" and I'm now quite excited about these projects.

While the 7 equation structural model on page 12 may not interest everyone, this new Ted Joyce Review Paper is worth reading. One of the great joys of modern empirical applied micro is our focus on measuring the unintended consequences of private and government choices. The original Donohue and Levitt paper merits the attention it has received. But, it is tricky stuff to test hypotheses about individual behavior using state/year data. In general, that was a 1970s approach.

The UC faculty has been warned that a 8% pay cut is coming in August 2009 . While you shouldn't feel too sorry for us, 8% is a big number and it will have long term consequences.

When the private universities are feeling richer 2 years from now, we will see a huge flow of talented academics moving away from the California sunshine towards safer harbors.

Dora and I are worried about gross flows. A faculty can grow if exits decline or if new faculty sign on.

Today the NY Times has an interesting piece on Prof O'Rourke's "Moonlighting" as the boss of GoodGuide. He has a fledgling 24 person firm that provides information on how "green" is a product when you use your cellphone to provide data based on its bar code. Read this article .

Two questions.

How does the NY Times select what books it will review? Or more specifically, why did they choose to review this "brilliant" book about West Los Angeles? This book appears to offer people in NYC, who are unable to move to LA but wonder what their life would be like if they moved to Los Angeles, a good reason for not moving to LA. This book sketches an LA that I don't see. Despite the fact that a spouse is a UCLA faculty member, this is not my Los Angeles.

Well, he already is a stata command, so why not introduce an entire equation for Jim Heckman? Most people West of Chicago believe that he merits another Nobel Prize. Would he agree?

Flipping through the slides of the Heckman Equation Project, I see a media push to solidify the intellectual case for investing more in the very young. Children cannot "buy" their parents.

The NY Times has a nice piece on the future of Paris as a "Green" compact city . I respect that they are thinking ahead about how to handle growth and its implications for housing markets and transportation and hence congestion in the city. I do not fully understand the height limit restrictions on housing towers. I appreciate that views are nice but building up has its advantages especially if the public health and crime costs of density have been tamed.

The LA Times has a cool web site that gives you a menu of tax increases and expenditure cuts to see what you would do to balance our state's budget.

Who knew that interactive media is so much fun?

I was able to balance our budget without too many tricks such as dipping into the 2010 revenue pot or by taking any $ from the community colleges or UCs.

As a book author and occasional book reader, I have been curious about Ed Glaeser's forthcoming Penguin Press book. While I am not Sherlock Holmes, I did discover this. It sounds fascinating and I'm sure it will sell a lot of copies. My mom will ask me why I didn't write that book and I'll have to tell her the truth. I am hoping that similar to Freakonomics that each of his past co-authors will get a piece of the royalties.

This Pew Trust Study is interesting and probably merits getting a serious academic involved in counting these "green jobs". I respect that these guys actually state a definition (based on industry categories) of what is a green job and look at medium term growth trends (from the mid-1990s until now) by state. The green jobs total counts do look small to me. California (a state with 35 million people)has 125,000 green jobs and 6.5 billion dollars worth of venture capital invested? (see page 8).