Environmental and Urban Economics

The world is filled with Ph.D historians.  I just had the opportunity to read a long piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by a historian named Geoffrey Parker as he writes about the long history of natural disasters and the risks posed by climate change.

Permit me to provide two direct quotes;

"Nevertheless, it took human stupidity to turn crisis into catastrophe. The meager French harvest of 1675 occurred just as the king raised new taxes to pay for his wars, with predictable results. Many people died of hunger, many more migrated in search of food, and in the west of France, many took part in the "red bonnets" revolts. Most striking were the signs of hardship written on the bodies of survivors.

This is the strange time of year when only a handful of campuses are not on summer break.  Stanford, University of Chicago, Northwestern, UCLA and just a few others are on the quarter system.  My students appear to be well aware that it should be summer time.  Attendance is down and students seek to have some fun.  I'm trying to make some research progress on several projects but I keep hitting speed bumps.

Greg Mankiw's blog nudged me to read Marty Weitzman's PBS presentation.  Marty's work is fascinating but note that there is no spatial component to his work.  He never discusses economic geography. In particular, he implicitly assumes that catastrophic climate change equally impacts every inch of the globe.   Shocks always create "winners" and "losers" and comparative advantage always exists.   The whole world (7 billion people) could live in a geographic area the size of Texas.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been re-reading the roughly 2600 blog posts I have written since 2005.  I owe everyone an apology.  Only 15% of them are good.  Too many of the posts are self serving, and/or silly.

Until this afternoon, I haven't jumped into the Pacific Ocean for at least 40 years.   I'm taken the plunge in Carlsbad, California.  From our beach hotel, I've been watching the ocean and the sunset.  If you are a mildly contemplative person who is seeking to relax, then this is the place to be.  Watching my son battle the waves allowed me to travel back in time to when it was my turn to battle the currents of the Atlantic Ocean back on Fire Island off of Long Island.

With Kobe out of the NBA Playoffs and nobody following the LA Mayorial Election, the LA Times has devoted a front page article to the "big story" that  two excellent brain scientists have moved (and taken their huge labs) from UCLA to USC.   Two thoughts.

1. Competition is a good thing!  When I was an Assistant Professor back in the 1990s, I taught at Columbia University.  Back then,  Columbia was a complacent place celebrating that it was the only Ivy League school in the world's best city.

We all know that "political economy" is hot stuff these days.  In this blog post, I will succinctly state my recent efforts on this subject.   You will be relieved to know that all of my work has been empirical.  I will discuss this work in random order.

Paper #1;  In joint work with Stuart Gabriel and Ryan Vaughn, we use a unique micro data set to study a major subprime lenders' loans between 2003 and the end of 2006.

Watch out academic NSF award recipients!   The American Public will soon be searching for you at this website.  If you do "silly work" that has been funded with public $, then  you may receive a lot of thumbs down and social shame.  While I am a big fan of the NSF system, this doesn't strike me to be a crazy exercise.   Academics should be held accountable for our work.  There are many Departments at my University where I would like to know what their faculty do all day long.

My mother has always hoped that I would be a "public intellectual".   While I have failed, many noteworthy academics at Harvard are willing to step up.  In recent years, Harvard's scholars have provided many big ideas for which they made national news.  Here are three famous examples;

1.  Today,  Ferguson on why Keynes was so focused on the short run.

2.  Reinhart and Rogoff and the critical 90% debt ratio.

3.  Larry Summers on women and hard math.