Back in October 2012, the Lincoln Institute hosted a great conference celebrating the work of UC Berkeley's John Quigley.    After a long and thorough review process,  RSUE (one of the leading urban and regional economics journals) has published a special issue based on revisions of the conference papers.  All of the papers are available here.   Ed Glaeser wrote a powerful history of John Quigley's Economic thought.   For any student interested in urban, I highly recommend that they read Ed's paper.

I published two papers in this special issue.

1. Nils Kok and I investigate the "green building" price premium using a large California data set.   Controlling for zip code/street/time fixed effects, we find that Energy Star certified homes sell for about 5% more than observationally identical homes that do not have this certification.

2.  Siqi Zheng, Weizeng Sun, Danglun Luo and I have created a panel data set by city/year in China to investigate the correlates of what raises the probability that a mayor is promoted.  We document that local economic growth raises promotion chances. Controlling for several factors, we document that mayors are more likely to be promoted if their city is experiencing reductions in air pollution.  This result suggests that Chinese mayors now have a greater incentive to address local environmental challenges. We expect that this paper will be well cited in an emerging literature on the political economy of local mayor's incentives to invest in "green cities".