Environmental and Urban Economics

What is the price elasticity of demand for "green" products such as electric cars? We know that there are lots of different companies hard at work on producing electric vehicles.

In this morning's print edition of the New York Times Arts Section (don't ask why I read it), I stumbled upon a brief mention that Freakonomics will be turned into a documentary and this Dubner blog entry fleshes this out.

Ignoring uncertainty, households and firms should do projects that have a positive net present value . Many empirical economics papers such as this one examine how a household's decisions are affected by its initial wealth.

When I was a teenager, I liked Kurt Vonnegut books such as Slaughterhouse Five . So, when the NY Times writes an article about slaughterhouses I read it. The Times reports a funny story. Apparently, there are gains to trade.

Harvard's Rob Stavins asks "Who Killed Cap and Trade?". The NY Times is asking the same broad question .

The recession has not helped the push to internalize the carbon externality.

Over the last month, reporters have been calling academic economists and asking important practical questions. Health economists have been asked how the Obama health care legislation will affect the budget deficit.

Today is a big day in California environmental politics. The Air Resources Board has released its new economic report providing details of its best predictions concerning the likely impact of this important regulation.

Will the Obama Health legislation increase political opposition to immigration? I see an expansion of coverage for 30 million people in the United States. This must be an income transfer to this group and this means that taxpayers will cover this.

On March 29th, I make my comeback as an environmental economics teacher. To prepare for this big day (and the 200 registered students), I'm vanishing and heading up to Berkeley for 10 days of solar panels and Prius watching and no blogging.

Economists seek to explain and predict human behavior. We believe that people can change their behavior as they receive "new news". Other research fields implicitly assume that people do not change our behavior and thus they predict the future using naive statistical extrapolation methods.

Mayor Villaraigosa announces L.A. solar energy incentive plan based on UCLA Luskin research

By Minne Ho March 15, 2010

J.R. DeShazo, the director UCLA's Luskin Center for Innovation, has long studied how governments can promote and help implement environmentally friendly energy policies.

Bloggers are talking about the $2 trillion bucks that states such as California owe in pension benefits to firemen, teachers, UCLA professors, and other public sector employees. As someone with a stake in this discussion, permit me to speak.

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As the proud owner of a 2008 Toyota Avalon and as a researcher who likes to make maps of where are the communities with lots of Prius vehicles (i.e Berkeley), I have been in deep thought about the "green" competition for auto market share. The NY Times wrote a thought provoking piece on this topic.

Does urban infrastructure such as new airports cause urban growth? China is running an interesting "natural experiment" in cities such as Libo (a city of about 166,000 in a mountainous region in Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in China) Source .

In a growing world economy, how do we protect natural resources to guard against "collapse"? International negotiations are unlikely to mitigate this clasic tragedy of the commons.

In today's NY Times, there is an article about the Obama Administration's urge to root out medical fraud and there is an article about my electric utility's (LADWP) desire to raise my electricity prices in the name of fighting global warming.

In fall 2010, Basic Books will publish my new book titled "Climatopolis". If you'd like to see a preview of some of this book's themes, then you might want to watch my presentation at the February 2010 USC Conference on Cities and Urban Growth.

When I was an undergraduate, the middle aged Professors seemed to be lecturing from "yellowing" sheets of paper that looked older than my grandfather. At the time, I thought this was curious but I didn't investigate this matter.

All change is bad. The Smart Electricity Meter roll out offers a test of this claim. These meters provide us with real time information about our minute by minute electricity consumption.

The Berkeley Electronic Press knows how to put together a nice special issue of a journal. The editor (Duke's Chris Timmins) did a great job nudging the authors of this economic geography special issue to work hard.

In 1976, Richard Freeman's book The Overeducated American was published. In a nutshell he argued that the returns to U.S college education were declining. Here is an old review by two prominent economists. With the benefit of hindsight, it appears that he was wrong.

Climate change is predicted to pose some low probability but highly risky scenarios for New York City when the water rises. Rather than passively accepting this risk, New York City can choose to shed some of its "victim status" by being pro-active.

I haven’t seen snow for three years and had forgotten what 35 degree weather is like. Over the last 4 days, I ate at three different Legal Seafoods in Boston and lost 10 pounds. While the last statement is false, I did have a great time in Boston.

The Village People made good music and distinctive music videos. I'm having trouble getting their sound out of my head as I read this new paper by Golan, Greene and Perloff .

My father offers some sound advice to President Obama today in this NY Times article . He still hopes that I will quit economics and go to medical school. It is true that UCLA's faculty salary cuts are lowering the price of making such a career transition.

The New York Times wants the United States to have clean water . But, does Justice Scalia want you to have such an amenity? The original Clean Water Act has a sloppy definition of its geographical scope.