Environmental and Urban Economics

Deans serve five year terms and often seek another 5 year term.  In this age of performance criteria, how are Deans evaluated?  Since they were originally chosen by the Provost, the Provost has a slight conflict of interest in determining whether the Dean has done a bad job during his/her 1st term.  Departments who are part of the Dean's Empire do not have the right incentives to tell the truth about the Dean's performance. If they anticipate that the Dean will be re-appointed and their remarks will become known to the Dean, then the Dean may seek revenge.   With faculty, external letters play a key role in determining evaluation but with Deans there is no role for such letters because all of the Dean's effort is unobserved by outsiders.

For everyone who teaches undergraduate economics and seeks fresh examples for teaching the time consistency problem, the New York Times serves up a beauty.

Read this NY Times article about California's High Speed Rail.  The following quote I reproduce below highlights a similar theme as my recent PNAS China Bullet Train paper.

National reporting on the new high-speed railroad (HSRR) encapsulates the strange delusions outsiders have of California. HSRR has been hyped as a fight between profligate Liberal Train-Huggers out to save the environment vs. Money-Savvy Conservatives out to save the budget.

I'm not sure why I keep volunteering to do this but I'm teaching undergraduate environmental economics at UCLA in the summer of 2013.  This is your chance (and may be your last chance for a long time) to take this exciting course.

If I might quote, Johnny Cash; "I went down to a Ring of Fire ..."   --- I won't sing for you but I do want to highlight this piece in the LA Times about the social interactions between the 1% and the 99% at the beach.  Here is a juicy quote from the comments section:

"HiVeloCT at 4:24 AM March 29, 2013 I've lived in Orange County since the early 60's and the privileged few who can afford oceanfront property have ALWAYS tried to run off those they consider to be "riff raff".

In this age of non-stop talk about the 1% and the 99%, are the 99% "out of the loop" when they attend Ivy League Schools?  In that past, this question might have focused on not being invited to the cool parties but a group of students at Yale Law School argue that students from lower-income backgrounds are out of the professional loop at YLS and this is diminishing their chances to be big stars as practicing lawyers or future law professors.

This article  documents that people seeking a coastal summer vacation along the Atlantic Ocean are substituting away from the New Jersey Shore because so many of the NJ communities have been badly injured by Hurricane Sandy.  These communities will lose tourist $ because of the shock but the tourists' dollars do not end up in a Cyprus bank account. Instead, there are other substitute locations for the tourists to visit instead.

From age 2 to age 7, I lived here in Manhattan in apartment #4c.

Today, there are some punchy letters in the NY Times.  This lively section tends to suffer from a fundamental selection issue that some anonymous editor chooses which letters to publish and he/she tends to choose letters that selectively affirm his/her world view.  I would prefer a "crowd source" approach where "the people" vote and the most popular ones are published.

Nasty Gal has moved to Center City Los Angeles.  Why?

"Ms. Amoruso moved Nasty Gal to Los Angeles in 2011, to be closer to her merchants and models. She shunned office space in Santa Monica, where ShoeDazzle and BeachMint are based, for less glamorous space downtown, where 20-something Nasty Gal employees in mesh crop tops, leggings and platform shoes stand out from the paralegals.