Environmental and Urban Economics

This webpage says that the MacArthur Foundation seeks to fight climate change. San Francisco's Tom Steyer has focused on this policy agenda.  Many successful progressives and non-profits seek to "fight climate change" through investing their time and $ resources to reduce our global greenhouse gas emissions through changing public policy.

If coal is the major dirty fuel, then why hasn't this group of actors figured out how to work together to use markets?  Right now they are focusing their efforts on changing policies but policies leak across borders.  U.S progressives can't change policies in China and India.  Suppose that the progressives pooled their ample $ and purchase just one asset called coal.

Here is a nice quote from a recent Wired Magazine article;  "And sure, the Paris deal isn’t perfect (it effectively relies on peer pressure to make sure countries comply). But after 50 years of warnings, even a tiny bit of progress feels nice."

So, when is peer pressure effective?  When can we achieve "order without law"?  Yale's Robert Ellickson has written the best stuff on this subject.

The NY Times reports that parts of York, Leeds and Manchester have recently been flooded.  Such natural disasters raise several adaptation questions.

What will be the medium term causal effect of the COP 21 Carbon Mitigation Conference?  The NY Times posited that it will save the world.  Is this true? How would researchers test for its causal effects?  In this blog post, I will sketch some performance metrics.

In previous posts, I have pessimistically argued that the free riding problem is here to stay and that this treaty will not achieve its lofty goals.

In his Sunday NY Times, Tyler Cowen has written a nice article about power couple formation and their implications for household income inequality.  Back in the year 2000, Dora Costa and I published a QJE paper documenting the rise of power couples clustering in major cities.  There are two mechanisms through which such couples could be found in major cities. Either they moved there as a couple or they moved as singles to the big city, met there and married and then chose to remain there.

I am sitting in the greater Santa Barbara area patrolling the beach after having spent a week in NYC and another week in New Delhi.  In February, I will turn 50 and this unfortunately leads to some introspection and some sad thoughts about how time just keeps ticking.  To cheer myself up, I have a checklist of some good work that I will release over the next couple of months;

1.

I am sitting in a Newark Airport Hotel after flying for 15 hours from Delhi back to the USA.   My flight left Delhi at 1130pm and landed at 440am --- a long red-eye flight.    I was in the Delhi area for 6 days.  On Wednesday of last week, we toured Delhi.  On Thursday,  Ryan Kellogg and I traveled to Agra and the Taj Mahal.  On Friday, we visited the Finance Ministry and then went off to the Neemrama Fort where our 2.5 day conference took place.

A major newspaper rejected this editorial submission that I "publish" below.   While rejection stings, I think I am making a new point that the climate change concerned media doesn't want to talk about.

No More Free Riders? Lessons from the Paris Climate Change Treaty

Matthew E. Kahn

USC

Department of Economics

In December 2015 in Paris, 195 nations agreed to take actions to limit the increase in the world’s average temperature to two degrees Celsius.

Elizabeth Kolbert has a new piece in the New Yorker; that focuses on the future of Miami.  It raises questions about how much we will suffer from sea level rise and who will suffer and who will gain. I first quote her and then I discuss my research on this topic.

A direct quote from the press release;

As Temperatures Climb, So, Too, Will Sea Levels

In “The Siege of Miami” (p.

Tomorrow I fly to New Delhi. I have not been to India before so I've been watching YouTube videos to get a sense of what quality of life is like there for the rich, middle class and the poor.  At the start of my research career, I studied the causes and consequences of green cities in the United States. My 2006 Green Cities book (Brookings Press) presents my main ideas.