Environmental and Urban Economics

My new book is currently ranked #13 on Amazon's best sellers in the "exclusive" Environmental Economics Category.  One book that ranks ahead of mine is Nina Munk's  The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty.   While I will not be buying this book, I am intrigued and hoping that some journalist out there will consider following me around for six years to learn about "my journey".  Here is a direct quote  from Ms. Bush from the book's Amazon page from something called "booklist"; 

"Jeffrey Sachs is a rock-star economist and advisor to leaders with struggling economies from Bolivia to Poland to Russia.

As I try to distribute my distinctive "free markets" environmental economics textbook, I'm now giving away the lecture notes and other class material.  All of this stuff is posted here.

A horrible accident has taken place in Mumbai India as a building has collapsed and many people have died.  In the NY Times article I read about this tragedy, it stressed that the building was old (built before 1950), I would like to talk about the quality of capital in cities experiencing sharp economic growth and the economics of vintage effects.

On Monday, October 7th 2013 I will give a lunch time talk at the UCLA IOE titled "Why Should Environmental Scientists Talk to Economists?"  I had originally planned to give a less sexy talk about buses.  Joint with Shan and Jerry, I will soon be presenting a new paper about buses at several U.S schools.   When I presented this paper at the NUS in Singapore, this paper was very well received.

Have you ever wondered who chooses to become a university dean or to run for public office?  Once these folks are in office, how do we set up a set of rules to incentivize these guys to do their job rather than to pursue their own narrow goals?  Tim Besley's book Principled Agents? is a great place to start for thinking about the broad topic of selecting and motivating leaders.

The September 2013 issue of the Journal of Economic Literature has a great Glaeser book review of Moretti's New Economic Geography of Jobs and also features a China pollution paper by myself and Siqi Zheng but the best paper is written by Pindyck.  Wow!  For those who call themselves energy and environmental economists, I suggest that you carefully read it.

In today's New York Times, Keith Bradsher makes some very reasonable points about China's bullet trains.  In March 2013, Siqi Zheng and I made exactly the same points in our published PNAS article.  Our work isn't mentioned.  In the Bradsher article, some guys at the World Bank are cited about their deep thoughts about the "market potential increases" brought about by the bullet train;

For example, Chinese workers are now more productive.

Abstract:   Economic theory predicts that people should not vote because they are unlikely to be the pivotal voter and voting takes time and effort.   Using a unique individual level data set on AEA Member voting, this study examines how the propensity to vote in the Economics Society elections is associated with the Ph.D program a person attended and his/her primary field of study.

UCLA ranks 77th in the nation based on this criteria while UC Berkeley ranks #20 based on mid-career salary data posted here.  Our other rival USC is ranked #54 and Stanford is ranked #8.  Now, there are at least three explanations for these facts.  The first explanation would focus on self selection bias related to who actually fills out these self reported earnings forms.

I have broken my 3rd toe on my right foot and this is causing me pain and making it hard for me to walk. Despite this short term setback, I would like to talk about progress.  The NY Times' Eduardo Porter serves up some doom and gloom in a piece he posts today.  He makes the crowd pleasing point that median household income has been stagnant for 25 years.  To his credit, he does devote four paragraphs to acknowledging some significant  progress.