Environmental and Urban Economics

The New York Post reports that Little Italy in Manhattan is shrinking as Chinatown expands.  The New York Times reports that Spike Lee is upset that African-American communities in Brooklyn are shrinking as "Girls" (white yuppies) move in.   What do urban economists think?  Scarce land is allocated to the highest bidder. Unless there is an externality, why doesn't this private valuation reflect the highest and best use of this land?   If you say that there is an externality that the historical character of the area should be preserved, this may be a fair point but a critic might ask "why?'".

Nate Silver's new blog is generating some readers and some excitement. University of Chicago graduates are supposed to engage in active debate about important ideas and Silver represents the UC well.  Recently, there has been quite a lot of talk about Roger Pielke Jr's post for the 538 blog.  I would like to make a few points.

I was very happy to see in the piece that he cited my work on the death toll from natural disasters.

Here are my slides for my talk at UCLA this Monday. You will see my usual blend of humor and wisdom.  My topic is the economics of the nascent California partnership with Quebec on carbon permit trading.   Here are the details about our conference.

The California-Quebec Adventure: Linking Cap and Trade as a Path to Global Climate Action

As usual, economists will be in the minority at this interdisciplinary event.

I read in People Magazine today that NFL great Tom Brady is selling this home in Brentwood, California (located 4 miles from me) to move to Boston.  For details about this $50 million dollar home, click here. I am aware that he works in Boston but he only works there for a few months a year and the team plays many away games and he is also approaching his retirement.   A move from Los Angeles to Boston that does not appear to be work related poses a challenge to the "consumer city" theory.

Google has been good for me.  It has allowed me to efficiently search for stuff that interests me and it has allowed me to write several economics research papers.  People have been interested in my past work on Google Searches as a tool to learn about interest in climate change.   Now you can read a draft of my new Internet paper focused on China's housing markets and what is revealed by Chinese households' Internet searches related to their markets.  Here is our paper's title and abstract.

I haven't swam in an Ocean for 35 years. Today, I made my comeback in the surprisingly warm Pacific.  If you had been at this beach at 5pm, you would have seen quite a sight.

This Stanford Anthropologist argues that Facebook makes us miserable.  She advances an interesting hypothesis that until people are connected to the Web that they are blissfully unaware of how little fun and status they are achieving relative to everyone else.  It is easy to "Keep up with The Joneses" when you don't know they exist.  Facebook confronts you with those smooth, attractive Joneses and the low ranked monkeys get depressed.  One study focused on this topic is discussed here.

The NY Times has published an interesting piece making the case that more cities should raise their minimum wage.  The authors argue that firms can benefit from complying with such wage hikes as their workers will be more loyal and will quit less.  The more interesting question to me here concerns the economic incidence of such local wage growth.

As a 1993 graduate who is married to a 1993 graduate and who hopes that his son may be a 2022 graduate in its college, the future of the University of Chicago is of mild interest to me.  In recent days, there have been interesting blog posts about the debt the university has taken on to finance new construction and anonymous posters have shared their constructive thoughts about the future of the school's renowned Economics Department.