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.

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The NY Times publishes new maps demonstrating that under business as usual scenarios for global GHG emissions that parts of current Shanghai will be submerged by the year 2100.  These predictions are meant to nudge the CCP to agree to more aggressive greenhouse gas emissions cuts.

In November 2015, I had the opportunity to participate in a media economics conference at the University of Chicago.  Here is the video.  I'm talking about this paper which is joint with Dora Costa.

Last night I had the opportunity to talk to Paul Romer about my 2016 Princeton Press book.  I did not

realize that I have bald spot until I saw this picture.  Live and learn.

I am not in Paris.  I wish the COP 21 attendees well as they try to overcome the global free rider challenge of reducing our GHG emissions.  As I argued in my 2010 book Climatopolis, global CO2 emissions will continue to rise and thus we must focus on adapting to what we have unleashed.

A fire is burning in Chicago at an industrial metal recycling facility.   Why does such activity even exist in a densely populated wealthy city?  What would Coase say?  To begin to answer these questions, let's return to Paul Krugman's work on economic geography.

The NY Times fumbles today in a piece by Paul Sullivan buried in the business section.  In his piece Climate Change and Choosing Where to Invest,  Mr. Sullivan mixes two different ideas and manages to mangle a potentially promising topic.

Astrophysics offers a new test of the Coase Theorem.  These brainy scholars like to look into a telescope and see what the universe was doing billions of years ago.

REPEC's performance metrics turn everyone in the profession into a single scalar value.  Here is the current ranking of the world's class of 1993.

The New York Times has published an obituary of Joseph F. Engelberger.   An early leader in robotics, Mr Engelberger was not concerned about that labor unions opposed his innovations.

How will a warming world affect economic growth?  Burke, Hsiang and Miguel made world news with their prediction that climate change will lower world income by 23% by the year 2100.  Their technical paper is here and here is an example of the news coverage.

Dr. Krugman has written a great column in today's NY Times focused on the consequences of  increased income inequality in Superstar cities such as Manhattan.

I don't like to leave Los Angeles. I only fly away when I anticipate that I might learning something at my destination.  On December 9th, I'll have an opportunity to sit down with Professor Paul Romer of NYU to discuss China.  My parents will be there and they are eager to meet Paul.

Starting on November 30th, negotiation teams from all over the world will go to Paris. Many academics will be there but you won't see me. I"ll be at sunny USC.   The final treaty won't have a hard carbon cap with enforcement nor will there be a global carbon tax.

The Washington Post reports about a new study that argues fossil fuel corporate interests (think of Exxon) have confused the American people through a relentless "mis-information" campaign regarding the causes of global warming.   PNAS has published the paper and it is available here.

Cooling vests offer one pathway for keeping us cool in future summer heat and also warming us up when it is too cold.  The Economist Magazine reports  about ongoing innovation taking place at Finland's VTT Technical Research Center.

Sociology lives on.  The NY Times reports that when NBA teams visit sleepy cities such as Indianapolis or Salt Lake City  that the visiting team players grow bored.

While the challenges vary on a state by state basis, here is one current report card grading states on their preparation for climate change.  Here I list a set of "free market" policies to facilitate adaptation.  For those who have read my 2010 Climatopolis book, this will be familiar.

1.

In the past, I've done some writing on social capital and civic engagement.   I just put the theory to the test by volunteering to serve on USC Econ's PHD Admissions Committee.     USC Economics is world renown for its excellence in econometrics.

Now that I have moved from UCLA to USC, I have the opportunity to teach undergraduate urban economics again.  I taught this course at Columbia and Harvard back in the 1990s but I haven't taught it since 1998.   My friends are trying to help me to teach a good course.

To better appreciate my 2015 November Journal of Regional Sciences Lecture at the Portland Regional Sciences Meetings, you should read this NY Times long piece about melting Ice Sheets and their potential impact on our coastal cities.

I am back in the sunshine after spending two cold, gloomy, rainy days in Portland.  The Regional Science and Urban Economics Association Meetings just took place there.

The NY Times reports that Texas households are being offered free electricity after 9pm because wind power generators are generating a surplus that cannot be stored and the physics of the local grid (which is not connected to the national grid) are such that the power must just flow and be consumed

On November 5th and 6th, I was back at the University of Chicago.  I was there to participate in a Media Economics conference organized by Matt Gentzkow and Jessie Shapiro.    Luigi Zingales and the conference participants provided really useful criticism of our paper.

If you manage to scroll down to the 103rd session posted here,  you will see that the LSE's Henry Overman and I will each present separate JRS Lectures at the upcoming conference.