Environmental and Urban Economics

I have wondered whether recession reduces the median voter's desire to enact costly environmental regulations to mitigate local and global externalities and this new California PPIC New Survey supports this conjecture. I've been writing a applied econometrics paper on exactly this topic. The results are preliminary but we are finding in 3 independent data sets support for the claim that people tilt away from environmental issues and prioritize economic issues when the local economy is in recession.

Environmentalists should care about this result because they are not at the margin. They are pro-green no matter what but in a democracy -- you need 50% or more of the vote and these swing voters do care. It is ironic that greens need economic booms to help them enact policies.

The McKinsey Consulting firm has identified a big free lunch for how to earn a very high rate of return for making investments in energy efficiency. Roughly 35% of the gains is said to be possible from the residential sector.

I have a question for the partners of McKinsey. Are they willing to put their money where their mouth is? Will they offer my household the following contract? "Professor Kahn, your current monthly electricity bill is $100 a month.

Not all of us have the same motivations. Gerald Gardner's consulting will look familiar to some labor economists. But, he did his study for the "right reasons" (to help the underdog rather than to make a buck). “What Gerry did was calculate the statistical chance that a woman could get a job in one of the male categories,” said Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Feminist Majority and a former president of NOW. “He calculated pay differentials. The disparities just flabbergasted him.

Suppose I give you information about what movies I have enjoyed in the past, and you observe my answers to your survey questions about whether I am a Rambo guy or a guy who likes to cry at the movies. Suppose that for a new movie, you observe the demographics and types of people who have chosen to see this movie and what their ex-post "grade" for the movie was.

Keynes didn't appreciate that it is hard to cut government spending once you start spending during a recession, so how will our budget deficit vanish to remove the temptation to print loads of new currency? This quote from Yahoo today suggests that taxes will rise sharply in two years but if I anticipate this do I save today? Will people vote for Republicans who won't follow through with this tax "medicine"?

"U.S. officials told reporters that the U.S.

Dora and I have liked the "fact" that our retirement plan at UCLA is a defined benefit. The cliche is that if we stick around that when we retire that we will receive 75% of our highest salary. How will this be financed? This NY Times article makes me nervous.

Now that I'm studying evolutionary biology, my list of creatures who are pretty good at adapting to climate change includes; toucans and camels. Is that an exhaustive list? I hope not but that's why we do research. I'm focusing now on a rare species called humans.

Applied economists who care about causality must solve fundamental "missing data" issues. We never observe outcomes for paths not chosen. But, suppose you observe no outcomes at all. Without a dependent variable, I would like to see the Nobel Laureates in econometrics estimate a "valued added" teacher prodution function.

Economists such as Greenwood, Goldin, Becker, Costa and Ramey have been writing about household production trends over the last 100 years but let's hear from Nixon and Khrushchev as reported in Safire's NY Times piece today.

Nixon: “I want to show you this kitchen. It’s like those of houses in California.

To augment my sharply cut UC salary, I will be moving to Beijing for September. I will take a job as a barista at a Starbucks in Beijing. It remains an open question whether I will return. Whose future is brighter; Los Angeles or Beijing? Last year, I told my environmental economics students that I was thinking of moving to China and they believed me. So, maybe it is true. Convergence is slowly taking place between UCLA salaries and Tsinghua Univ. salaries.