I agree with others that bloggers such as myself have nothing new to say.  So, rather than talking about Greece or Paul Krugman, I want to talk about my father's recent publications. Here are some titles of his work that you are unlikely to see in the QJE.

Influence of the hepatic eukaryotic initiation factor 2alpha(eIF2alpha) endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress response pathway on insulin-mediated ER stress and hepatic and peripheral glucose metabolism


Is it open or is it closed? Thrombosis of a St. Jude's tricuspid valve prosthesis


Doppler echocardiography and computed tomography in diagnosis of left coronary arteriovenous fistula


If anybody knows what any of these words means, please get in touch with me.

Economists like to compete and Google Scholar has given us a new way to compete with a ranking system that is merely one mouse click away.  Is this metric better than the REPEC metric?  We don't care.  We just want to compete.  We will soon see how many well cited economists register so that they can stand out in the pecking order.

Somebody should write a paper on this!  Such a researcher would face a riddle.  When I looked at the top 220 people (ranked by cites) who have already registered, only 12 are women.   Are women less vain or less cited?  You can use REPEC to answer the 2nd but how will you answer the 1st question?

Neo-classical environmental economists have a strange relationship with our ecological economics brethren.   The ecological economists seem to believe that natural capital is the ultimate limit to sustainable growth while neo-classical economists posit that new ideas and innovation can continuously allow us to avoid "limits to growth".  We believe that through endogenous innovation that capitalism helps to accelerate the discovery of new ways to produce basic things we need such as food and energy services.  In a salute to Paul Romer and other growth thinkers, we believe that new ideas can and will arrive that will save the day so that we do not starve and do not suffer in a changing world.

Today's NY Times has an example of ecological economics that I understand.  The ecological economists are eager to turn waste (an output) into a productive input.  Such general equilibrium flows would lead to a more efficient capitalism.  As this article highlights,  computers are major producers of heat.  We all know that computers get hot and that big firms must run air conditioners to keep them cool. This NY Times article posits that a "win-win" would be to lock such computers in people's basements so that their furnace would no longer be needed. Instead, people would get their heat from the electric furnace (the computers).  This is a groovy idea but it raises a couple of issues.

1.  How would the home's electricity consumption be disaggregated into that which is consumed in the basement versus that which is consumed by the occupants of the home?

2. What do you do to minimize the probability that the basement floods?  How do you minimize the probability of vandalism by outsiders?

3. What happens to the family ping pong table?

4. How does the family who lives in the home guarantee that no teenagers will break in and play around with the computers?  How will two sided liability work?

5. Is there fire risk from all of these computers? How often would nerd technicians be entering the home to tinker around to make sure that the data centers are safe and clean?  

But, I do like that the nerds are thinking outside the box of how to turn waste into a productive input. If energy prices rise, this would be even more attractive for households who want some heat coming up from the floor boards.  Perhaps the ecological economists and the NBER economists can make the peace!

This is a scary piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Academics want fame and we know what makes the headlines.  Demand creates supply. In the case of baldness cures, that's good but in the case of funky social science research --- is it still good?

A NY Times opinion piece today argues that suburban buildings are major electricity consumers and that this is bad.  The piece presents no facts about what a Microsoft Campus' per-worker energy consumption is and what it would have been had the campus been assembled in downtown Seattle.  In this blog post, I'd like to talk through the issues.

I have some street credibility on this topic.  As you know, I have written about suburb/center city differentials in energy consumption here, here and here.  In new joint work with Nils Kok and John Quigley, we are studying commercial building electricity consumption using building level data from a large California utility.

The Professor who wrote the Times piece didn't answer the basic question;  "Why are offices locating in the suburbs?"   An easy answer is that land is cheaper there and when there are large residential suburban communities then this will attract offices for accountants, lawyers and other services that the residential community will demand easy access to.

A harder question is why so many major modern companies such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook want to have large suburban campuses.  Why don't they locate downtown?   The tradeoffs are pretty clear.  In center cities, there is a land assembly problem. If Google wants to have low density buildings with green space, this will be hard to assemble in downtown San Francisco and very costly.  There will be existing buildings which may have historic preservation status.  In the suburbs, land is cheaper and converting farmland or suburbia into a corporate campus features many fewer headaches.   The author of the editorial could have done a better job discussing how bad center city public schools and center city politician induced "red tape" stifles the desire of employers to locate new entities downtown.  It appears that only Don Trump can make fast headway with downtown development.

Now, from an environmentalist perspective is suburban growth bad? As my past work has documented in terms of transportation she is right that people use the car in the suburbs and are much more likely to use public transit in the city.   Since land is cheaper in the suburbs, people and commercial interests purchase more of this land than they would have had they located in the city.  If air conditioning scales with unit size, then they will consume more energy than if they located downtown. More empirical work is needed to quantify these "counter-factuals".   But, we also know that suburban buildings are newer than center city buildings.  If new buildings are much more energy efficient than old buildings (even if they have been renovated) then she could be wrong.  This is one of the questions that Kok, Quigley and I are investigating.
She could be right but there is an empirical research agenda here that she is assuming rather than quantifying.

If you want more center city "infill" development, then you should push for lower crime in center cities and increased public school flexibility so that more families choose to remain downtown.  As center city quality of life improves, more employment will follow.

The rise of San Jose as a sprawled and productive center of "Silicon Valley" highlights that firms can be driving distance from each other and enjoy productivity spillovers.  Cars certainly cause serious environmental challenges. To address this, we need higher prices for gasoline as this would accelerate the adoption of the electric car.  Introducing a carbon tax would guarantee that the electric car's power source would be renewable power or natural gas. The end result would be greener cars and a suburban economy still offering the gains to trade but with a lower environmental impact.

As gas prices rise, will small cities suffer as airlines cancel small jet flights connecting them to big cities?

Will fear of future drought nudge you to buy plants that thrive in Afghanistan?

In a world where Elton John has been knighted, shouldn't Johnny Rotten's art work be preserved?  London's thought leaders are now wrestling with this issue.  To quote the Express Newspaper;

Now leading archaeologists are debating whether the graffiti should be preserved as a work of historical importance."

Ed Glaeser has argued that historic preservation has gone too far in limiting "progress" and such artificial barriers to urban housing supply are a major cause of high real estate prices in such "progressive" areas.  Knowing how much Dr. Glaeser enjoys the sound of Johnny Rotten's band, I bet that Ed will reconsider his past work in light of the new news.

Suppose that a military contractor's earns its revenue from selling hardware to the military.  Suppose that this contractor makes a marginal piece of equipment such as those over-priced Osprey helicopters.  If the market believes that the Super-Committee in Congress will fail to come to an agreement and this triggers military cuts, then does this company's stock price decline as the "new news" that the Committee has failed becomes public knowledge?  This article says yes.  What would be an empirical test that indicates that the stock price has "over-responded" to the new news?  Perhaps these helicopters can be sold to China and the firm's stock price could rise?  We want more free international trade, don't we?

I missed this piece by Joe Romm about future Dust Bowls caused by climate change.  Here is a dramatic quote from this subtle thinker;