Yale University's Law School produces stars.  Due to the diversity of the Yale Law School faculty, and the fact that students are randomly assigned to first year classes,  researchers have the opportunity to tease out whether taking Law classes with friends of Adam Smith shapes law students.

The NY Times recently reviewed two books that go on at length that the U.S Southwest is an unsustainable hellhole that will soon suffer greatly because of climate change and drought.

In this morning's SF Chronicle, Scott Ostler writes about Stanford QB Andrew Luck's choice to take easy classes this semester as he focused on his Saturday games and his chance to win the Heisman Trophy.  Here is the quote that caught my eye.

"Luck needs two more classes to graduate.

Macro economists do not have a monopoly on term "crowding out".  The NY Times uses it today in an article about the night use of Central Park.  As crime has fallen in the Big Apple and people are feeling safer, they are dropping their guard and taking more risks by walking in the park at night.

Washington DC will soon make a major investment in cleaning up its rivers.  The details are provided here.  Such infrastructure investment takes serious $.

As China grows richer, electricity demand will rise.  Given that China's urbanites are buying cars and that China is a net importer of oil, it appears to be a reasonable home market strategy for China's powerful state to nudge forward the production of electric cars.

You know that you are growing older when the obituary section is your favorite part of the newspaper.   Say what you want about the NY Times but it has a very solid obituary section.

I am making plans to visit Fudan University in Shanghai this summer.  To prepare for this trip, I enlisted Google to teach me a bit about its economics department.  Since I can't read Chinese, I have to rely on English translations and I found one here.

This book chapter taught me several facts.  Based on its Table 2.1, 3.9% of workers worked for government in 1900 and this percent grew to 6.7% in 1935, 15.1% in 1970 and shrunk to 14.1% by 1984.  The military is not included in these percentages.

2012 will be an election year and in the Summer of 2012 there will be an intense focus on London and its Olympics and whether the Miami Heat will win a NBA title.

For those micro teachers seeking to spice up their classes, consider teaching this case.   Apparently, there are some obese people who fly in the coach section of airplanes.  If such an individual sits in a middle seat next to you, what happens next?  This article explores the "spillover" effects.

2011 has been a good year but I hope to get more work done in 2012.  In calendar year 2011, I taught 5 courses.

Today, California's electricity is mainly generated using natural gas.  By the year 2020, AB32 legislation requires that 33% of the state's power come from renewables such as wind and solar.  This is the renewable portfolio standard (RPS).

A funny economist has written a funny OP-ED for the NY Times.  You can read Yoram B's piece here.  He returns to the old question of whether jerks self select and choose to be economists or does studying economics transform angels into pedantic Darth Vaders?

Permit me to defend my wife and myself.

I am not surprised that more and more reasonable people are starting to think about climate change adaptation.  Such thoughts begin to offer an escape route helping us to sidestep many of the challenges that climate change will pose.

Have you ever wondered what is the view from Room #1421 at the Ala Moana Hotel in downtown Honolulu?   From my balcony, I could see "Soviet Style" architecture and the Pacific Ocean.

This 3 page memo is a promising step for having an honest discussion about climate change adaptation.  To repeat my long held view.  Climate change is a real challenge that is exacerbated by economic growth in population and per-capita income.

Who volunteers to be a guinea pig?   Common sense suggests that you must be desperate for a cure (to sign up for a risky new drug) or committed to the cause (such as California unilaterally pursuing reducing its GHG emissions sharply under AB32).

I may have forgotten what Ricardo taught us about comparative advantage.   Why doesn't Michael Jordan mow his own lawn?  Why is Matthew Kahn doing his own grading?  Maybe the answer is comparative advantage.

When we dispose of products such as computers and car batteries, what becomes of them?  The NY Times reports on another version of the pollution havens hypothesis.  Our car batteries go to Mexico and the lead is plucked from them.  This work increases exposure to some nasty stuff.

Optimists of the world unite.  This article talks about cities making capital investments in  "winter weather equipment, which will help better prepare the roads for travel when the weather hits.

The NY Times reports that for profit drug companies smell new opportunities to sell pills in Asia and are responding by increasing their R&D to make new pills targeted to diseases that people in Asia are more likely to suffer from.

Every two months, the NY Times publishes an article about China's environmental pollution challenges.  Today, there is a piece  about recent high levels of air pollution in Beijing.   Permit me to say a few things.

Why is China setting out credible energy intensity reduction targets?   Have they been motivated by pep talks by Tom Friedman and Al Gore?  I don't believe that this will cut global GHG emissions but it will slow the growth of global GHG emissions and it will accelerate the introduction and diffusio

Professional athletes market their skills on an international market. Such a market offers a revealed preference test of which nation is the best.   Stephon Marbury has voted with his feet and claims that China is the place to be.

The LA Times provides clues here.  I don't know of any UCLA faculty who live there.  Road speeds are too slow in LA.  You can only move around at roughly 15 MPH so it is quite frustrating to be in "close" proximity to some destination but that it takes too much time to actually get there.

Click here to read huge chunks of Dr. Glaeser's Triumph of the City for free.  Click here to read huge chunks of my Climatopolis for free (chapters 1,3,6 and 7).

On Monday, I will be speaking at lunch time at my UCLA Institute of the Environment about my China research.  Over the last five years,  Professor Siqi Zheng of Tsinghua University and I have written seven papers about environmental quality in China's cities.

Maps can be powerful tools for conveying information.  This map  highlights that the UCLA Anderson School of Management has had an international impact.

This Harvard Crimson article provides details about the plans that Occupy Harvard participants are taking to continue to camp out even as it gets cold outside.  This is another (and funny) example of expectations causing ex-ante adaptive efforts that help us to cope with changing climate conditions.

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.

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.

Neo-classical environmental economists have a strange relationship with our ecological economics brethren.

This is a scary piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Academics want fame and we know what makes the headlines.  Demand creates supply.

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.

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