Environmental and Urban Economics

This 22 year old  has purchased a nearby home in Little Homby for $85 million.   I assume she won't be using the local public schools in the short run.  At a 1% property tax, she will be paying roughly $16,000 a week for garbage pickup.   That's civic engagement!  

Note that she is from England.   As I have argued before, one way for us to address our budget deficit and stimulate our housing markets is to auction off United States passports. Everyone's always saying that we need to export more. Our passports are something that foreigners want!

So, if we sell two million passports a year at $250,000 each, our treasury department will collect $500 billion a year.

Which sub-field of economics throws the best conferences?  My new vote is for "urban economics".

ADB Workshop on Urbanization in Asia

Honolulu Hawaii, December 14-15, 2011

Call for Papers

The Asian Development Bank (ADB), in collaboration with the East-West Center and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, invites submissions of substantial abstracts, or preferably completed but unpublished papers that focus on urbanization in developing Asia.

In Japan today, there an increasingly urgent effort to conserve on electricity consumption.  While most economists would suggest that the price mechanism could be used to discourage use (see Frank Wolak's study), an alternative strategy is peer pressure, "shame and ostracism" and relying on guilt.    UCLA scholars have been studying how UCLA students respond to information about their relative electricity consumption to see if our impressive students can be nudged to change their behavior.

For the first 45 years of my life, I have tried to figure out what am I actually good at.  It turns out that the answer is simple; writing book blurbs.  Want proof?  Compare these.

In April, I attended the Fortune Brainstorm Green Conference in Newport Beach.  At the dinner, I met Mark Fulton and his wife.  We had a very nice talk about many issues.  So, I was very happy to see that his team at Deutsche Bank has just issued this stimulating new report that benchmarks nations with respect to their willingness to engage in serious carbon mitigation measures.

For those of you looking for new UCLA insights on the broad topic of real estate and urban policy, please take a look at our new blog.

The Wall Street Journal reports on some interesting urban economics related to Amazon having to pay state sales tax and the consequences of this tax regime shift on where it locates its warehouses.   Back in 1999, an economist named Austan Goolsbee (have you heard of him?) wrote this paper whose abstract tells the story;

"The rapid rise in sales over the Internet and the fact that most Internet buyers pay no sales tax

has ignited a considerable debate over taxes and the Internet.

Santa Monica is a pretty, progressive city adjacent to the Pacific Ocean and 5 miles from UCLA.  In 2008, I had hoped to buy a house on Harvard St. in Santa Monica but the owner turned down my low ball bid.  This article  sketches the challenge that this liberal city faces.  In my own work, I have documented its high count of hybrid vehicles but it also produces a fair bit of trash. It faces the challenge that the landfills it ships to are demanding higher prices for sending it to them.

Important recent statistical research has documented how weather shocks have affected recent U.S agricultural production.  For those hoping for good news for how innovation and new ideas can offset Mother Nature's blows;   Here is some optimism.  "Rice – which provides nearly half the daily calories for the world's population – could become adapted to climate change and some catastrophic events by colonizing its seeds or plants with the spores of tiny naturally occurring fungi, just-published U.

The Toyota Camry Hybrid is priced at nearly $7,000 more than the conventional Toyota Camry.   In contrast, the "Lincoln MKZ hybrid stands out, offering a value proposition that is unique in the auto industry: a hybrid with the same price as its conventional gasoline counterpart."   Is this pricing differential between the hybrid version and the conventional version between these two types of cars a puzzle?  This article provides some facts.  "The hybrid Lincoln starts at $35,520.