Environmental and Urban Economics

Tyler Cowen notes some relevant trends here . I talk to people and they say that applied micro has suffered over the last 15 years as top Americans have gone to Wall Street rather than the professor route. When I was a graduate student 20 years ago, my entering class was 50% American. Now I believe that at Chicago it is 15%. So what? I'm go back and forth on the causes and consequences of the globalization of research economics. I look at the MIT faculty. It is a highly international group and they are certainly churning out great research except when the World Cup is played and then the place turns into the United Nations.

Well, we know we can't screw in a lightbulb but that can be outsourced. Auction theorists know that they have made a difference in the real world. Want proof? Click here . Preston McAfee serves up a very interesting recent intellectual history.

What else are we good for?

On improving the design of health care policy, here is an example from MIT's jon gruber.

On designing well functioning carbon mitigation legislation, I can point you to Dr. Stavins' input .

Here is proof that I can publish in a history journal. The Costa/Kahn book was reviewed in a history journal and we were invited to reply. I wish that the Journal of Economic Literature would allow me to respond to Ed Mills' review of my Green Cities book.

Books: Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death

Mark S. Schantz

Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2008

ISBN-13: 978-0801437618 ; 245 pp.; £20.95.00

Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War

Dora L.

People in New York City want clean water to drink and access to cheap natural gas. This article highlights the tradeoff. To protect the water supply from pollution at the drill site, the energy company has been pushed not to drill in upper New York State. Given that the company believes that a huge amount of natural gas is located there, they are frustrated.

In this Economix Piece , Ed remembers a great economist. It is striking that a great man's life can be boiled down to roughly 2000 words. You live for 25,000 days (if you are lucky). At 10 days a word, this piece is a powerful reminder of John Meyer's key contributions to economics.

Today, transportation economics is a vibrant field.

According to this article , Columbia University plans to move some Nobel Laureate faculty from their current Medical School location to a new location. Will this raise or lower productivity of the Medical School as a whole? Presuming that the Nobel Laureates offer positive local spillover effects (is this always true?), the losers will be their current neighbors. The article quotes a colleague of theirs who implies that it would be a bad thing to move them.

We roughly know what economists do all day (teach?, blog?) but what about everybody else? In this interview, UCLA's Richard Ambrose sketches his background and explains why he studies water systems.

Now that I know the modern research university, I still think I would have entered academic economics. A good friend once told me that I would have been a homeless person had I not become an economist.

James Hamilton has written a great pithy piece on the possible causes of the recent deep recession. As a retired macroeconomist (I dropped out in 1988), I wonder how modern macro guys will figure out how to disentangle the possible explanations that he poses.

I woke up at 430am this morning to participate in this debate on Japan's efforts to reduce its CO2 emissions. I'm glad I did it. The other NHK panelists were smart. The challenge is that I do not speak Japanese so the translator was constantly taking my words and translating them so there was a delay. I had to look at myself on the TV monitor and that was a scary sight. There was also a slight delay in transmission so when I moved in real life, I moved slightly on the tv screen 1 second later.

Who said that California no longer creates jobs? Here is a new "green job". Your office will be pretty close to mine and you may actually see me once in a while. In sunny Los Angeles, I mainly work outside but I certainly do appear at the UCLA Institute of the Environment. In my humble opinion, this is an excellent job. I will be serving as one humble member of the search committee. I seek someone who can help me raise my productivity.