Environmental and Urban Economics

Back in 1986, when I was a student at the LSE, I didn't read The Guardian. Flash forward 30 years and I know read it.  Take a look at this piece from Australia.

At a Cincinnati Zoo, a young child was at risk of being attacked by a gorilla.  To reduce this risk, the zoo killed the gorilla.

The Economist Magazine has published a long special piece on Europe and war refugees.   Unless I missed it, this "politics" focused piece didn't investigate market approaches to handling the crisis.

Before the Smart Phone, imagine the following situation.  A restaurant on one side of town has 500 tomatoes delivered and due to unexpectedly low salad demand it only needs 80. In the past, the cost minimizing option was to dump the remaining 420 tomatoes in the garbage.

Back in 2010, I published my Climatopolis book arguing that the economics of climate adaptation becomes the key issue as global GHG emissions will continue to rise because of the global free rider problem and rising fossil fuel consumption.

Early work in environmental and urban economics treated a city's non-market characteristics as fixed and exogenous. So, think of San Francisco's beautiful climate and topography and views.

In a letter to the WSJ today, Thomas Gibson argues that relying on lower cost imports is not always in the importer's best interest. Do we teach our students this point in Econ 101?

"The Wall Street Journal seems to find the American steel industry inconvenient.

I will be teaching Econ 101 at USC this fall. There will be at least 150 students in my class.   There are several Principles textbooks I could use that charge different prices.  Greg Mankiw's book is priced at $219.  Joe Stiglitz's book is priced at $176.

An active research topic in macro focuses on "productivity wedges".  Many scholars are building on Hsieh and Klenow's work to measure how large are the differences in the marginal productivity of firms with respect to their use of capital and land.

On the front page of the WSJ today, there is an article about the Congress passing bipartisan legislation intended to reduce consumer exposure to dangerous chemicals.  The tone of the article is optimistic that this new regulation is better than the old TSCA regulation.

The BBC has published a dramatic piece reporting that some of Exxon's shareholders are making a major stand that this fossil fuel intensive huge company must change its game and diversify away from oil.   The NY Times has published a similar front page article.

4% annual macro growth would be great.  Today, Paul Krugman offers a couple of suggestions for how to achieve this and he explores how the U.S economy grew in the 1990s. In June 2015, John Cochrane offered a much more specific plan that would achieve this key goal.  Will Dr. K really allow Dr. C.

Yale's President Peter Salovey appears to be defending Prof Erika Christakis  and Prof. Nicholas A. Christakis in this graduation talk.

At the end of a semester, students fill out teaching evaluations.  This short run assessment is becoming more common in judging hotels, restaurants and other entities besides for Econ Profs.   Here is a piece talking about this issue.   Here is Yelp's website.      A couple of basic questions;  1.

This will be a blog post about fixed costs associated with working; namely commute times and health insurance.   Why?  This article celebrates Sweden for launching a six hour work day experiment.

On May 10th, Eduardo Porter published this piece in the NY Times.  I will reprint a single sentence of his and use this as a "Rorschach Test".

Eduardo Porter is not an economist but the New York Times pays him to write its "Economics Scene".  It appears that a physicist can express himself in a high profile outlet about economics (but not vice-versa).  Permit me to directly quote from his piece today.

To reduce its aggregate water consumption, UCLA will soon stop giving towels to users of its gym.  This will not reduce overall water consumption if sweaty people bring their own clean towels that they wash at home.

Tom Steyer may want to call up some Berkeley economists this morning.  Here is a direct quote from the NY Times that refers to him;  “We object to the political agenda of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

June 29th 2016 will offer an interesting natural experiment regarding San Francisco's homeless problem.

The WSJ has published a high profile interview with Russ Roberts of GMU.  While I always enjoy popular press profiles of economists, this piece throws a misplaced punch at modern academic economics.

I was not invited to this recent dinner party at Steve Tisch's house.  So, I learned several things from this NY Times article.

1.

A quick peek at Facebook's recent stock price dynamics suggests that the market doesn't believe that a conservative boycott of FB will take place or that even if it does that it wouldn't impact the company's growth.

The NY Times has a nice article about the challenge that a set of birds called "red knots" now face in our warmer world.  Imagine if people couldn't buy food or store food. Imagine if your diet was focused on just a few varieties of nutrients.

Prof. Siqi Zheng of Tsinghua University and I are delighted that our new book (Princeton Univ Press) is now for sale on Amazon.  Blue Skies Over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment  studies the causes and consequences of pollution in urban China.

Without mentioning the witches from Macbeth, the NY Times engages in some foreshadowing today as it offers the following conjecture;  the challenges that Puerto Rico faces today of crumbling services and unpaid bills will play out soon enough in many U.S cities.

Will the "economics of Facebook" become an active research topic?   Up until now, economists have used Facebook to study social network patterns.  The recent claim that Facebook is slanting its "trending news" with a bias against Conservative ideas raises a set of new questions.

Ashenfelter and Greenstone published a JPE paper on how to use state speeding laws to estimate a state's implicit value of life.  I will follow the same logic to analyze the Professor Menzio  "terrorism prevention" case.

President Don Trump will provide some interesting variation in key economic variables.  This will allow macro economists in the year 2040 to make some research progress.  Many macro economists have written that the world lacks "safe assets".

Each week my family separates our recyclables from our regular trash.  The former are put in our blue bin and are placed out on the curb for pickup on Wednesday mornings.

I greatly enjoy these monthly "report cards" that REPEC delivers.  We all need short term rewards to nudge us to continue to engage in continued effort.   Here are some metrics with 47,000 economists ranked.

Environmentalists and concerned citizens should read this piece.  It covers a lot of ground but for a blog post, it offers a lot of ideas at a price of $0.  Towards the end of the piece, the authors finally get to their main point.

The NY Times has published a long piece about households in Louisiana who are moving away from the area.  The people in this group are called "climate refugees".  This is very good sociology and a nice case study but is this "good economics"?  

Over our life, most of us move.

The UC Energy Institute has an excellent blog.  On this blog, Jim Lazar claims that for every mile of driving that this causes $2 in social costs. He credits Todd Litman with this estimate.