The NY Times has published a nice piece about the rise of power couples and their implications for household inequality. Intuitively, if two top economists who have a stay at home spouse choose to divorce and marry each other then household income inequality increases.
Mark Zuckerberg is an honorable young man but does he fully understand the consequences of his invention? The NY Post quotes him getting pretty righteous as he declares that FB causes World Peace.
Nick Stern has some tough things to say about Integrated Assessment Models that are used to judge the cost of climate change. It would interest me to hear what Bill Nordhaus would have to say about this critique. Dr. Stern's remarks echo some of Bob Pindyck's sharp criticisms of this research.
Justin Gillis is a consistent writer for the New York Times. Here is his piece from today talking about a new paper published in PNAS. Yes, coastal areas will face challenges from sea level rise but such areas face strong incentives to adapt to these challenges. Mr.
This blog post represents a piece of marketing and a commitment device. As I think about the next 3 to 5 years, I'd like to sketch out an optimistic vision for intellectual growth of USC Economics.
Permit me to point out some great stuff in today's Sunday Review section. Let's start with a piece by Kasia Lipska. Dr. Lipska is an endocrinologist at Yale Medical School but she appears to believe that she "moonlights" as an industrial organization scholar.
Today I was on at the Cal State University Northridge campus. It is a beautiful campus that looks nicer than both UCLA and UC Berkeley. The buildings are nicer and the campus has a nicer layout (I realize that land is cheaper in Northridge than in Westwood and Berkeley).
My USC colleague Antonio Bento is a hard working man. Thanks to his effort, we now have an environmental economics seminar. While I tried to launch this at UCLA, it didn't work. The faculty and students at UCLA just weren't interested. I'm highly optimistic that this new USC effort will succeed.
The NY Times recently published a piece on the "dark side" of teachers teaching falsities to impressionable young people.
In the name of "saving money", the leaders of the University of California have made the pensions for future hires much less generous.
The NY Times reports on the challenge that young Saudis face as oil prices collapse. It tells a story of a nation where everyone appears to have a soft life of working for the government.
Prof. Martin Weitzman recently gave the Max Weber Lecture focused on the economics of climate change. Here are his slides. Marty is a giant in my field and is an incredibly deep thinker.
Read Dr. Krugman's column today and see if you can find any thoughts about long run economic growth.
The NY Times reports about an important fight between balancing real estate development and environmental conservation along the beautiful California coast. Back in 2010, I co-authored a paper studying how real estate markets are affected by this regulation. Here is my paper.
Joe Romm is a consistent thinker. He has posted another round of "doom and gloom" in this piece he offers some "predictions" focused on what will be the impact on the U.S caused by climate change. Here is his best paragraph.
The World Bank has released a 227 page report that you can download here. The report focuses on poverty and climate change. It is a high quality report that cites some very good academic studies.
Paul Krugman wrote a very optimistic blog entry the other day arguing that renewable power will just keep getting cheaper and thus the "price" of mitigating climate change risk keeps falling.
