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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today, UC's President Janet Napolitano distributed a letter which features some very good news for the University of California.   Instate tuition will remain frozen at roughly $12,000 per year and Governor Brown will provide the UC with extra $.

As we celebrate the publication of Richard Thaler's excellent Misbehaving,  must neo-classical economists surrender and apologize for our long embrace of Mr.

Back in the 1990s, Owen Lamont wrote this paper about the incentives of macro forecasters over their life-cycle.

This is an infomercial for Sugarfish in Beverly Hills.   If you like great food and you seek to stimulate our economy (that's a joke), then you should go there.

Richard Thaler's Misbehaving has been published.   I own an e-copy and I've read 4 chapters now.  Thaler writes as he speaks.  He is lucid and witty.

Two weeks ago Justin Gillis reported that weather extremes will become more severe and more likely in the near future.

Urban economists have created an exciting new literature examining the rise of "Consumer Cities".

Mayor De Blasio is heading to UC Berkeley to give a talk thanks to an invite from  Prof. Bob Reich.  While Mayor De Blasio is unlikely to hire me to write his speech, I thought that I should offer a sketch of how I would present his talking points.

The NY Times often repeats itself over and over again.  Few new ideas are explored.  Today though, George Haikalis has written a brilliant Opinion Piece.

I was once a labor economist.  At the University of Chicago, my thesis committee consisted of Sherwin Rosen, Gary Becker and Bob Willis.  I have published a piece in the Journal of Labor Economics.  I was Jacob Mincer's colleague at Columbia for several years.

In this Denver Post piece,  Mayor Fraser demonstrates his forward looking vision for how his mountain town of Telluride will cope with climate change.  He points out that his ski resorts will face a challenge if temperatures in winter are over 32 degrees.

John Kain was the earliest proponent of the spatial mismatch hypothesis.  Today, the NY Times reports that Harvard researchers are focusing on the lack of transportation access as a key reason for why the poor remain poor.

Anticipate and react.  This mantra holds in basketball and in climate change adaptation. Airports in Boston and San Francisco are well aware that their location places them at risk from sea level rise. Are they passively crossing their fingers and hoping for the best? Or course not.

The Lead Article in today's NY Times focuses on urban economics and the causal role of growing up in a low poverty area for subsequent economic success.  David Leonhardt et. al. have written a great piece highlighting some very important NBER research by Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, Katz et. al.

I have heard of Luke Skywalker but now I know about "lukewarmers".  This article  claims that Matthew Ripley is one of them.    A quote from the article:

"lukewarmers have much more mainstream views than the easy stereotype of the denier.

REPEC creates a 36 dimensional vector of output criteria for academic economists. For each criteria, REPEC calculates an economist's rank and then takes a geometric mean of these ranks  to create a single index of quality. Sorting this index creates a ranking and economists like rankings.

This is the age of "Big Data".  Researchers can test some interesting hypotheses when we can access such data.  Here I briefly discuss three of my recent energy economics papers.

In 2014,  Nils Kok, John Quigley and I published this paper studying commercial building electricity consumption.