Environmental and Urban Economics

I am in Istanbul, Turkey.  Tonight the World Congress for Environmental Economics starts.  Today I went for a two hour boat ride with Jing Cao and Shan Li and took this photo.  We had a great time on the water.

Soon, I will arrive in Tel Aviv.  This has been an action packed trip as I have visited two cities in Italy, three 4 cities in Croatia and now am in Turkey.  Israel and China are my next stops.

A slight piece of boasting.  Google Scholar informs me that I have reached 7,000 career cites.    For a 1993 Ph.D, that averages out to roughly 1 cite a day for 21 years.   My medium term goal is to reach 20,000 GS cites in 5 years.   That would be a respectable number of cites.

What would you say if I told you that your students can read a $1 textbook that teaches, through a number of "real world" examples, the leading ideas in environmental economics?  What if I told you that the book contains a number of free market environmentalism ideas that will simultaneously interest your students and get them to focus and challenge their neo-classical econ teacher?  Enough of the hard sell, here are the facts;

Dear Professor Smith,

Thanks for getting in touch.

Joe Nocera has written a loving tribute to ASU's President Michael Crow in this NY Times piece.   To his credit, Dr. Crow is thinking hard about how to make his school stand out from other public universities and to achieve the double bottom line goal of increasing access to higher education for all people.  Such "out of the box" thinking is exactly what competition fosters.    More ambitious universities should be thinking about strategies to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack.

In April 2014, Tim Groseclose published his book "Cheating An Insider's Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA".   Admissions to elite universities is highly valued.  Who should be admitted and what criteria should be used for judging files?  To his credit,  Tim provides all of the admissions data he was able to access through a California Public Records Act request.  You can download the data here.

Nobody has a strong preference to be a "low ranked monkey".  Whether in the NBA or at the University of California,  workers are unhappy when they know they are below the median earners.   But does being "unhappy" translate into being unproductive?

In this blog post, I will provide a sketch of a good undergraduate economics honors thesis.  There are many economics students with strong quant skills who aspire to be the next Nate Silver.

On Twitter, I see some chuckling that 51% of people polled in a Bloomberg Survey view climate change to be a "minor" or "no" threat.    While we don't know how people interpret the question;  what does the word "threat" mean and to whom and when,  what information would an empirical analyst need to answer the threat question?

To sketch a brief answer to this question; let's assume that every person is a risk neutral expected utility maximizer.

In two weeks many of the world's environmental and resource economists will gather in Istanbul Turkey.  I will give one of the three keynote talks and I will focus on climate change adaptation and cities.   Adaptation is the awkward topic that many intellectuals (including many Ph.D. environmental economists) feel uncomfortable talking about.  Why is that?  In this blog post, I offer some conjectures;

1.  Intellectuals genuinely worry that the world is going to hell.

Twenty years ago when I was a young Asst. Professor at Columbia University, I was given the task of teaching Econ 101 to 350+ undergraduates.  I haven't taught this course in recent years but I have a few thoughts about how to do it right.   The appropriate topics and pace of such a course are discussed here.  Let's assume that the Professor teaches for 150 minutes a week for 12 weeks.

Do U.S environmentalists support the recent policy of the U.S Commerce Department to impose tariffs on Chinese solar panels?  Whether international trade is "good" for the environment is an old question that Larry Summers wrestled with in this memo and Copeland and Taylor have done great research on.    In this 2012 paper, Aparna Sawhney and I argue that free trade in "renewable power equipment" raises a new set of trade and the environment issues.

Paul Krugman has written an interesting piece   He states; "So the real obstacle, as we try to confront global warming, is economic ideology reinforced by hostility to science."   I don't think this is right.  The real obstacle we face for why the U.S isn't taking the lead on this issue is sunk capital and suburbanization.  We are a nation of suburban voters.