Environmental and Urban Economics

Given time constraints, I wouldn't have guessed that I would be interested at all in reading a book about Thai productivity growth but MIT's Robert Townsend has written an impressive new book.  For all of you microeconomists who are amazed by the long lived representative agent who lives on in Macro, Townsend's book offers some solid micro foundations featuring household heterogeneity.   This book represents a key "micro-macro" bridge.

I bet that all fans of the Roy Model of comparative advantage and self selection into sectors will really like this book.

As discussed in Chapter 6,  each worker faces an occupational choice.  He can work as an unskilled worker, work for a firm, or start his own firm.

Google has some fantastic economists working for them.  Did Hal Varian work on the recent Google study focused on the "free lunch" offered by carbon pricing?  Here is  my cross-post on this subject.

China's local governments have borrowed a lot of money from the state government.  Is a crisis brewing?   To quote the article,  "Liu Jiayi, the top auditor in China, said on Monday that at the end of last year local government debt had reached $1.7 trillion, or about 27 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Research involving human subjects involves benefits and costs.  All universities have created internal review boards (IRB) to minimize the probability that future nerds torture subjects or make phone calls to restaurants claiming that they have received bad service (for details click here or here).   The IRB will sign off on some "deception" studies if they believe that such deception is necessary for testing a hypothesis and that the social benefits outweigh any costs.

I will soon start my second trip to Beijing.  This blog won't be updated at that time because the wise Central Government doesn't allow access to "blogspot blogs".    In Beijing, I'll be working with the Lincoln Institute where I will be giving a set of lectures related to my work on "green cities".   The participants will be professors from many Chinese universities so this will be a very good opportunity to influence how environmental and urban economics is taught throughout China.

We need guinea pigs to try out new ideas and to experiment.  Those who stumble upon a good idea will teach lessons to the rest of us.  A Los Angeles couple has built a a very green home.  Note that they are from Germany; a place with high electricity and water prices.

Small businesses are a leading growth engine for our economy.  With this point in mind, I was excited to receive this announcement from Beth Laski..

Sean Knibb’s SK1 Furniture Debuts at Calypso Home St. Barth Brentwood

New Indoor/Outdoor Tables, Chairs, Benches, and Cubes Unveiled July 7

Brentwood, CA – Designer Sean Knibb’s latest indoor/outdoor furniture collection has found a

new home at Calypso Home St. Barth.

Erin Mansur and I have written a paper focused on estimating how the count of manufacturing jobs in a local area responds to that area's labor regulation, environmental regulation and electricity prices.  Abstracting from transportation costs of inputs and shipments of output to final consumers, a cost minimizing production facility will seek out a geographical area featuring low regulation and low electricity prices.

In this age of field experiments and randomize trials, "old fashioned" natural experiments are not in style. But, permit me to take you back to the 1990s methodology back when I had hair and I was full of ideas and energy.  This article  offers a map of new train routes connecting China's Superstar cities to some 2nd tier cities inland.

As you can see, different cities will be part of the greater network at different dates.

I am teaching summer school at UCLA this summer.  There are roughly 65 talented undergrads in my environmental economics class.  I'm a good teacher and I have my own style.  I often look to the NY Times for real world examples to teach.  This article caught my attention and I will start with this example tomorrow morning;

"Portland is disposing of eight million gallons of drinking water because a man was caught on camera urinating in a reservoir.