Environmental and Urban Economics

Recent news reports have focused on VW's Emissions cheating scandal.  The fully story is available here.  For those interested in the costs and benefits of regulation, this case study reveals information about the cost of environmental regulation.

Each Sunday I read David Warsh's piece.  This week's column reports a strange quote from Harvard's Larry Summers.

In a relatively close distance to Syria, there are many nations such as Romania who might be willing to participate in a migrant auction.

Haishi Li is a brand new Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago's Economics Department.   He is a friend and co-author of mine.  He sent me a photo of himself next to a photo of the 1988 Entering Class at the University of Chicago.     This photo is now 27 years old.

Nick Kristoff has written a NY Times piece that I learned from and enjoyed reading (a first!).   He celebrates the rise of "fake meat".

He writes;

"So look out.

This week, I am declaring that Paul Romer wins the competition for posting the most interesting blog post among the economics heavyweights named; Krugman,  Romer ,  Cochrane and Summers.

Don't worry, this will be a G-rated story.  For the last day, the UCLA IOES core faculty  held a retreat at the Topanga Canyon Inn.  Since I'm on leave this year, I haven't seen several of my colleagues for months.   I arrived just before dinner on Wednesday night.

Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale must be a very smart guy.  He is tenured at Yale and my wife greatly respects his book Bloodlands.    Google Scholar suggests that has been his big work.

The NY Times often features Justin Gillis.  Mr. Gillis is very worried about our future if we fail to cap our greenhouse gas emissions. In a piece just published, I will report a few of his choice quotes.

Dora and I have a 40% market share of the new September 2015 Journal of Economic Literature.  Her piece on long run trends in health is better than mine but my review of Jeffrey Sachs' new book  The Age of Sustainable Development might interest you.

This year I am a faculty member at both USC and UCLA.  I am quite impressed with both sets of colleagues.

The probability that a blog post will be accepted for publication (with only a light revision required) is quite high!   I have often argued that academic economics would make greater scientific progress if our superstars "stay in the game" and write more and engage more rather than drifting off int

Many behavioral economists seek to improve our quality of life and are especially interested in helping the less fortunate.  This article claims that up to 33% of diabetics don't know that they are diabetic.

In the car today as we drove back to Los Angeles, my son asked me where all of the European refugees from Syria should move to within Europe.

While "enlightened" entrepreneurs such as Bloomberg, Musk and Steyer celebrate the nascent green economy, there are other entrepreneurs growing rich from fracking activity.   Today there is a race between "green technologies" that have a smaller climate change impact than fossil fuel technologies.

The NY Times has published a long article about Gov. Brown's policy nudge to reduce California's petroleum consumption by 50% below today's level by the year 2030.  Is this an impressive "Green Big Push"?  Can California stop climate change?

California consumes 11% of the nation's gasoline.

China, Japan and South Korea have gained valuable experience producing high quality public transit buses, subways and railroad equipment.  One reason that these nations acquired this knowledge is a large home market for selling such capital.

In Rome, garbage pickup takes place in the middle of night in order not to disrupt the city during peak hours.

Are college athletics and classroom learning substitutes or complements?  In this blog post, I propose a simple experimental design for testing this.    Consider the following example.  USC's academic year features two semesters (Fall and Spring) and the school year starts in late August.

I'm not sure why I received the following email:

Hello Matthew,

I am writing to inform you that the renowned Primm Ranch, located on 10 acres and five minutes away from the Las Vegas Strip, will sell at auction without reserve through industry leader Concierge Auctions.

Wired Magazine reports  that John List and J-PAL are not the only researchers running field experiments.   Ecologists are running "out of sample" field experiments to test which plants, trees and creatures can adapt to extreme heat that they have not been exposed to in the past.