Environmental and Urban Economics

These are exciting days to work on environmental economics.  Now that my son is a teenager, I'm feeling less guilt about attending more conferences. On a recent trip to China, I attended 3 conferences in 4 days and this weekend I participated in an environmental economics conference at ASU.  This excellent conference as organized by Kelly Bishop, Alvin Murphy and Nick Kuminoff. You can read about all of the details here.  For better or worse, I've reached an age where I'm now one of the wise "older people" in the room.  I must admit that I'm grateful to Kerry Smith and Michael Hanemann  both for being good friends of mine and for providing excellent comments on the paper I presented on Friday afternoon (and for being older than me!).

In their 2006 JPE media paper, Gentzkow and Shapiro  begin their piece by contrasting how the New York Times and Al Jazeera report on the same foreign policy event. I experienced something like this today because "The Conversation" just published a piece I wrote. The title for my piece is:

"As Incomes Rise in China, so Does Concern About Pollution".

I will leave it to my readers to decide if my new piece for The Conversation delivers academic rigor and journalist flair or whether it really represents journalist rigor with academic flair.    I must admit that we made a strategic mistake publishing an optimistic book about China's urban quality of life in the middle of an ugly U.S Presidential Campaign.  

It appears that I will never enjoy the feeling (and the resulting royalties) of publishing a good book at the right point in time.

My mother worries when I stop blogging for a while but I must admit that I haven't had anything to say.  Here is a recent 6 minute video of me discussing my 2016 China book.  The China Daily wrote an unusual piece about our book today.

Fifteen years ago, Amazon's Pat Bajari and I started to work together on an urban economics paper studying household choice of housing type (i.e number or rooms, building year built) and neighborhood within major metropolitan areas.  At first, we assumed that a household head already had a job and then searched for a place to live.

Back in 2005, I wrote down the names of 22 economists who I thought would win a Nobel Prize soon.  Nine on the list have now won.  My list must beat a random dart throw at the AEA's phone book?  For the technical discussion of the 2016 winners' work read this.

Here is the Jane Jacobs biography review.  Here is the Judge Posner book review.   The Jacobs biography traces a "David vs. Goliath" story of Jacobs making the case during the urban renewal era of the 1960s that the incumbent real estate and neighborhoods had a charm and a vitality that would vanish if the "Central" urban planners built their towering mega-buildings and built out their highway plans.

Daniel Wilson of the Fed of San Fran has written a high quality panel paper available here.    His unit of analysis is a United States  county/industry/year/month and he is studying how employment in these units of observation are affected by the county/year/month's snowfall, rain and temperature as well as the weather in the previous 3 months.   Using data from 1975 to 2015, he explores how weather affects economic activity.

Carl F. Robinson has just posted a thoughtful review of my 2008 Heroes and Cowards book (joint with Dora Costa).   For reasons I don't understand, when our book was published Princeton Press filed it under "Sociology" and the broader community of economists and demographers didn't really engage with our book.

War time is high stakes.  One faces extreme death risk.