Environmental and Urban Economics

James Heckman has written many papers  (and see this) about the importance of developing non-cognitive "soft skills" in young children.  He argues that such early age investments can build up these skills and that these skills pay off in terms of higher future wages.   A standard approach for measuring such soft skills is the Big Five Personality test.    Such a test measures you on;  5 major dimensions of personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism.

I would like to make a research suggestion in this Big Data age.   Each Uber customer has a personal Uber rating.  I propose that researchers use this as a "Crowd Sourced" Big 5 personality test.

New York City runs 11 very expensive public hospitals that cater to the city's poor.  The New York Times reports that the Mayor wants to inject $2 billion dollars in subsidies to help the public hospitals to balance their budgets.  There are several interesting pieces of economics here. As the poor's health insurance has improved, many of them have chosen to "vote with their wallet" to seek care from other hospitals and local service providers.  So, the demand for their product is falling.

Last month, Rhiannon Jerch, Shan Li and I released a NBER Working Paper studying the cost of moving a public sector bus one mile and how this varies across cities and over time.    We argue that this standardized government service measure offers a useful "measuring rod" for comparing government efficiency in providing basic services.

The NY  Times has published another article highlighting that life isn't fair.  This is a fair point.  In this case, the article is about product differentiation documenting the fact that the wealthy are treated better than everyone and that everyone knows this.  In the past perhaps, ignorance was bliss?   Is the world on a "highway to hell"?

Permit me to provide you with some direct quotes from some leading economists.

1.

Nature has published a new paper that has enraged some climate activists for the wrong reasons.  Here is an example of the headlines it is generating.  Let's introduce some basic concepts from environmental and urban economics.

Let's assume that a person wants to survive and wants to eat pizza and wants to live in beautiful weather.

Define the probability of survival for the next year if you live at location A = Prob(A).

Terrible heavy rain (16 inches!) has hit Houston on Monday 4/18/2016.   To protect its population Rice University cancelled school on Monday and Tuesday.

I was very sorry to read Prof. Stan Wellisz's obituary.    Stan and I were colleagues from 1993 to 1996 and from 1998 to 2000.  Columbia's Economics Department was a distinctive place in the mid 1990s.  There was a very famous senior faculty (think of Mundell, Bhagwati, Findlay, Phelps, Lancaster, Mincer, Vickrey) and there were some famous young senior faculty (such as Bloom, Caplin, Hayashi, Hubbard, Rodrik) and then there were a huge number of junior guys such as me.

In Iowa in February 2016, among voters between the ages of 17 and 29, Bernie Sanders won 84 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton's 14 percent.  If the young love Bernie, then does this mean that they reject the logic of Econ 101?  How much of Greg Mankiw's textbook would Bernie agree with?  Permit me to quote from Senator Sanders' Webpage  (all quotes are from here).

USC Economics has had a very good day.  We have now heard from almost all of the Ph.D students who were admitted into our program and our yield is extremely good.  Our recruiting committee worked quite hard to recruit an excellent group and we have done our job.  UCLA Econ should keep an eye on us.  We did lose a student or two to UCLA but this won't continue for much longer.