Environmental and Urban Economics

Here is the video of my May 21st 2015 Keynote at a Drexel University conference on sustainability.  Here is the video of my May 26th 2015 talk about China at the LSE.

It is growing cheaper for "Benevolent Big Brother" to watch you.  Cops will have body cameras, Amtrak train engineers will be on "candid camera".  Cars are video taped at EZ Pass access points.   Would Professors give better lectures if Deans could randomly sample video of our lectures?  (I post all of my lectures on line as a commitment technology forcing me to actually function).

To celebrate my return to the LSE, I'm giving away free copies of my revised e-Book on Tuesday and Wednesday.  While the book ususally sells for $1, I will drop the price to $0.  The "bang per buck" will be quite high if you click on the right icon!  This is your chance to learn some environmental and urban economics.

Today, I'm at Drexel University speaking at this sustainability event  and Tuesday I return to the LSE to talk about my China research.     Yesterday, I learned a good lesson about Uber. You never know who you are going to meet.  A Hollywood Movie Star drove me to the airport.  Those of you who are fans of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre may remember LeatherFace.

The City of Los Angeles is raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour.    Do David Neumark and David Card agree on the consequences of this well intended policy?  Neumark's papers on this subject are listed here.   Card's research on this subject is available here.   The current minimum wage is $9 so a 66% increase is not "marginal".

In the aftermath of the Amtrak train disaster, railroad unions are demanding that a second engineer ride in each train.   This poses an interesting public policy question related to behavioral economics.  A second engineer would be costly to hire and the union would love to have more well paying union jobs.  But, a benefit of the second engineer would be that the probability of a disaster would decline.

The NY Times has published a long pseudo-Freudian piece about the respective legacies of Gov. Pat Brown of California and his son Gov. Jerry Brown (the current leader of California).   In a nutshell,  Pat was the leader during a time of growth and optimism.  He liked people and he wanted more people to move to California. In contrast, Jerry is a dour dude who openly declares that there are "limits to growth" and he is not afraid to say "no".  He faces constraints that his father did not face.

Dora Costa and I have just published an urban economics piece about the trends in the geography of health inequality in major U.S cities 100 years ago.  Here is the source: AER May 2015 Papers and Proceedings piece.

Here is our Intro

Today, there is great interest in the geography of opportunity.

Sisters meet for the first time at a Columbia University writing seminar.

Entourage and the declining influence of CAA and WMA?

Desalinization as a tool for augmenting California's water supply during drought ;  challenges posed by environmentalists

FAO Schwartz leaves 5th Avenue  --- bricks and mortar vs.

I will teach undergraduate Environmental Economics at USC this fall.  If you click here,  you will see that my class enrollment is capped at 40 students and each of my students will have already taken intermediate micro.    After having taught 120 person enviro econ classes at UCLA where roughly half the class hadn't taken principles, this will be a very good experience for me.