Environmental and Urban Economics

London has long featured extremely high housing prices and has been ranked with New York City and San Fran and Los Angeles and Paris as one of the world's most desirable cities.  Post-Brexit, will London lose this elite status?  This raises the issue of what productive and amenity attributes of London will now change?

Will superstars like Elton John continue to want to live there?

Will leading finance firms continue to want to do business there?

Will Europe's talented young people continue to migrate there to work?

Will rich people from Russia and the Middle East continue to park their money there invested in real estate?

A sketch of some answers;

London is unique in terms of temperate climate and beautiful architecture and an orderly European feel while the language is English.

The New York Times has some fun mocking Don Trump today.   Here is a quote from this piece. "At one point, Mr. Trump even compared his renovation of Trump Turnberry to how he is hoping to overhaul the United States. When a reporter pointed out — correctly — that a country is hardly a golf course, Mr. Trump replied: “No it’s not, but you’ll be amazed how similar it is. It’s a place that has to be fixed.”

To an urban economist, a country shares many features with a golf course.

The NY Times reports that the old in the UK support leaving the EU while the young wanted to stay remain in the EU.  As the large set of Baby Boomers ages (and keeps voting because they are living longer), what other policies will they vote for?  Demography's impact on political economy would appear to be an important research topic.

People should go back and read this important paper;

Poterba JM. Demographic structure and the political economy of public education.

While environmentalists sometimes celebrate ingenuity in turning waste into a productive input, the NY Times reports a case where this approach may have been taken too far.

QUOTE

Chinese officials have pledged to replace school running tracks made of industrial waste that have reportedly sickened thousands of children, the latest public health scandal in a country already troubled by environmental hazards including air pollution and soil contamination.

During my years on the UCLA faculty, I made many friends across the University.  Rick Sander is one of them.   Today, his work faces criticism in this NY Times piece by Richard Lempert.    Dr. Sander has argued that affirmative action in university admissions policy has the unintended consequence of sometimes hurting minority students' long run success.  Such a case can occur if a student is mismatched and sent into a program for which the student is not properly prepared in the short run.

Professor Nordhaus started the political business cycles literature many years ago.   As I read about Elon Musk's running up a lot of debt as he tries to push Tesla forward, I wonder whether Tesla will go bust under a Republican President?  Given that Mr.

This is an interesting article.  Researchers are spreading the news that rapid climate change in Africa may sharply reduce maize yields.

According to the study, rising temperatures and an increased number of droughts brought on by climate change are significantly reducing the crop durations of maize in Africa. Crop durations indicate the length of time between the planting and harvesting of a crop, and the shorter they are, the less time crops have to mature.

"Crowding Out" is a powerful economic idea.  When I taught at UCLA, I worried that private donations to this public university were low because potential donors worried that for every $ they gave to UCLA that the governor would give a dollar less to UCLA and instead give it to some other pet cause (such as UC Merced or bullet train construction).  In this case, this would be "complete crowd out" because the donor's dollar donation caused no increase in UCLA's endowment.

I am very sad to learn that Prof. Phoebus Dhrymes has recently passed away.   We were colleagues at Columbia from 1993 to 1996 and from 1998 to 2000.  He was a highly skilled econometrician who wrote comprehensive econometrics textbooks.   I would ask him econometrics questions and he would tell me to go read the answer in one of his books.   Over the years, I bought several and even read one of them.  

We got on quite well even though I suspect that he thought that I cracked too many jokes.

Do leaders matter for determining economic growth?  A New York Times OP-Ed writer claims "not really" in this piece.  In contrast,  Ben Jones and Ben Olken argue using cross-national econometric evidence that "leaders matter" (especially in autocratic states).    I'd like to make a couple of points;

1.  Investment in human and physical capital determines a nation's future economic growth.