Environmental and Urban Economics

An Opinion Piece in the LA Times argues that the NSF should do a better job prioritizing its strategic investments in basic science.   Here are  some direct quotes:

"Do the mandarins of the social sciences really believe that a study of depictions of animals in National Geographic magazine (which the foundation funded) should take precedence over research to identify markers for Alzheimer's disease or pancreatic cancer? A large fraction of highly ranked, important grant proposals are not accepted because of limited resources.

The House of Representatives passed legislation in May that would go a long way toward stopping the creep of mediocre scientific research funding at the foundation.

Back in 1972,  Issac Ehrlich and Gary Becker wrote a very important JPE paper on endogenous probabilities.   Consider a simple example of a fire that burns down your house.  This event is a random variable that every family fears.  The probability of this event is partially under the family's control. If nobody in the house smokes or lights candles, this reduces the probability of this horrible event.

Tyler Cowen's Uber Column  makes several very interesting points.  Every time I'm in an Uber car, the driver starts talking about his Uber rating.   This rating is some moving average of how his last X riders have rated him.  Today, Uber knows this rating for each driver at each point in time and each driver knows his rating.   Many potential employers of Uber drivers would like to know this working quality rating.

In today's WSJ, Prof. Lazear has written a piece highlighting the importance of a state's "business climate" as a driver of local growth.  He focuses on "Right to Work" legislation as a key empirical benchmark for identifying "business friendly" states.   While I agree with him, it is important to note that "unfriendly" states such as California can thrive because it has unique exogenous attributes (climate and amenities) that cannot be found anywhere else in the U.S.

I will spend the 2015-2016 academic year at USC.   I'm running this "field experiment" to see if I'm a better match teaching USC undergrads and advising USC graduate students than what I've achieved at UCLA.   While my UCLA undergraduate classes feature too many students, I have tried my best to deliver a serious education.   Go to "Bruinwalk" and you can read this description of my past teaching.

In gentrifying Brooklyn, early property owners are getting rich. In this piece, we learn about the life story of several residents. Here I would like to provide a couple of direct quotes that provide some useful insights about urban housing markets.

1.   Information on the real time value of housing is a valuable commodity.

On Twitter, I am a "follower" of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.  Here is a "retweet" from Twitter and a happy photo of a set of big city mayors.  This group of optimistic and happy people is convinced that they have helped the 99% by raising the minimum wage.

Slate has a thought provoking piece about the quality of future Universities if faculty do not have tenure.  Economics offers a few insights here.

Point #1:   Salaries would rise to compensate faculty with outside options for taking on the "risk premium" of being fired by their Deans.

Point #2:  Faculty contracts would become much more complicated as a type of "piece work" would arise where some engineers who have other jobs at companies would agree to teach one course a semester.

The Economist's Voice has just published my short essay that states six predictions about how we will adapt to climate change. I contrast predictions based on behavioral economics model of expectations and investment behavior and contrast this with the predictions based on a rational expectations investment under uncertainty model.