Environmental and Urban Economics

This piece about China's demand for natural resources got me thinking again about the broad topic of "limits to growth".

Detecting cheating is difficult. You can't ask a sumo wrestler whether the non-linear payoff system he faces induced him to throw a match. He might eat you. But, shrewd economists figured out how to detect cheating in that important sector.

We know that the Olympics has a "causal" impact. It helped to beautify Seoul in 1988 and cleaned up Atlanta's air in 1992 and Beijing's in 2008.

All major universities have student newspapers. After serving for 17 years as a faculty member at a number of excellent schools, I'm always amazed at the insipid content of these newspapers. Usually, you wouldn't know that the University has a research faculty.

Phil Jackson has won 10 NBA coaching titles. Now, my mom could coach MJ, Kobe and Shack to a title or 8 but let's abstract from the quality of his inputs in production of victory.

The New Yorker Magazine routinely rejects my cartoon caption suggestions (for their weekly contest) and now it has selected to profile Paul Krugman rather than me. These slights help me to keep working on academic stuff as I seek to rise in the REPEC rankings of economists.

During the academic 2010-2011 year, UCLA will charge undergraduates $10,000 tuition per year. Our Ivy League Peers charge roughly $40,000 per year. Consider this modest new funding model for UCLA:

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Economists love to talk about time consistency and the dynamics of tax rates. The public does not share this love. Consider the case of Wyoming . Like all states, it is seeking out new sources of revenue.

In the middle of 70 degree winter in West L.A, the UCLA men's basketball team is no good. Due to budget cuts and abundant opportunities at less sunny private universities, some excellent faculty are preparing to leave and we have not been able to hire replacements in the short run.

Meg Sullivan has done a nice job writing up a press release on a new paper that I wrote with Dora L. Costa. Is there a clear link here to "green economics"? Here is a free copy of this paper and you can judge for yourself.

Gary Libecap and Rick Steckel have put together a new edited volume that uses the historical experience to examine how farmers, urbanites, and the economy as a whole has adapted to past climate shocks. Note that economists are the authors of these chapters.

Over the last two days, I have finished edits to my new book Climatopolis. Basic Books will publish it this fall. This is the third book that I have written and I can tell you that there is "learning by doing".

Do China's best and the brightest work for their powerful state or in the private sector? The NY Times' Tom Friedman hints that the Chinese government is filled with 200 IQ people. He argues that China is pursuing a wiser long term energy policy than the United States.

Yesterday, I listened to an interesting lecture on the economics of carbon capture and sequestration at my UCLA Institute of the Environment. As world electricity demand continues to rise, developing nations will use coal fired power plants to supply a big share of this demand.

Google will soon run a very interesting experiment. As discussed in this newspaper article, Google is getting ready to "wire" certain liberal cities with fast cable that will allow users to download data 100 times faster than they can now.

Real Estate economists have argued that "location matters".

Paul Krugman might like Roger Myerson's New Paper .

Using data on Hybrid Vehicle counts by census tract and by zip code, I have documented the spatial green "hot spots" for these vehicles in a series of papers including; paper #1 , paper #2 , and paper #3 .

Dear UC Friends,

Despite the furloughs, the hiring freezes, the rising health insurance costs and the coming pension crisis, the sun still shines and our students are still motivated and eager to learn.

Just as hippies continue to celebrate the August 1969 Woodstock Music Festival, in the future, energy nerds will fondly recall the March 2010 UC Berkeley Energy Institute Power Conference .

Why do people not vote? If the "time price" of voting could be sharply reduced, would more people vote? Michael Ni thinks the answer is yes and so does the OP-Ed writer from the LA Times.

Has investment in transport infrastructure really helped China's economy to achieve 9% annual growth? Yesterday, the NY Times celebrated the fruits of China's investments in fast trains .

Urban Universities such as UCLA, Columbia and Washington Univ. in St. Louis want to grow. The nerds on their faculty actually want lab space and offices. The students want nice dorms, libraries and classrooms.

The New York Times is filled with news today. David Brooks demands that our President should focus on one key theme that would unify our diverse nation. I'll propose one. Let's erase our border with Canada and Mexico and have a new unified nation called North America.

This has been a strange week. I spent monday and tuesday in deep thought about the UCLA Statistics' Department's Past, Present and Future. There is nothing more fun than to serve on a Departmental Review.

Ed Glaeser is a good man. I am a weak man and I sometimes need a morale boost. This helped. It reminded me that the Zheng, Wang, Glaeser, Kahn Paper that focuses on ranking China's "Green Cities" using unique micro data is a pretty good study that merits more research.

Eli Broad must live within 5 miles of my Westwood house. He has done more good for Los Angeles than I have.

Now that I'm older than the players and the owners, I refuse to watch the Super Bowl. It just isn't that "Super" anymore. So, I'd prefer to talk about terrorism. My old friend Eli Berman has a new book on terrorism and the NY Times favorably reviews it today.

We know that there are too many young men in China looking for a date relative to the number of young women there. This NY Times article says that the reverse is true on the modern U.S campus.

Where is the Pigou Club when we need it? We all want budget discipline and some of us want to avoid climate change.

The young men at economics jobrumors have some candid and accurate comments about Washington University's Economics Department posted here .

Saul's Deli sits on Shattuck Avenue in between my in-laws' Berkeley home and the UC Berkeley campus. Given that I walk back and forth, I often go to Sauls. Their food is salty and expensive but it does remind me of my roots in New York City.

Skimming through the headlines at William Parke's Economic Roundtable , you will quickly see that the economics bloggers span a big space of ideas and ideology.

I had forgotten that Alex Pfaff and I wrote a good paper a long time ago (when we were both on the esteemed Columbia faculty) on key environmental issues in LDCs with large informal sectors. Here is a copy of the paper . Below I reproduce the introduction.