Environmental and Urban Economics

The New York Times devotes a lot of effort to bashing the Chinese Communist Party, thus it is interesting that today the Chinese leadership receives praise from the NY Times.   The backstory is the fact that President Trump is repealing President Obama's low carbon policies.

The NY Times has published a great piece about Acemoglu's co-authored piece on the economics of robots.   The "headline" claim in Daron's new paper is that robots cost us jobs (substitutes not complements).   I'd like to sketch a few claims that might explain their fact;

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I am very happy to announce that the Brookings Institution has just published my new paper  titled "Protecting Urban Places and Populations from Rising Climate Risk".  Back in 2011,  David Levinson and I published "Fix it First" and that paper became well know. I'm proud to write a sequel.

Nick Bloom has published a very nice general interest piece in HBR discussing his new co-authored empirical work documenting rising inequality across firms.

The NY Times has published a touching piece about London in the aftermath of the recent terror attack.  Several years ago, I published a piece that contrasts adaptation to terror risk versus climate change risk.  I think it is useful to restate my key points (here is an unpublished draft).

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President Trump is helping a future generation of economists to publish natural experiment papers.  In a "natural experiment" research design (see QJE back in the 1990s), a sudden policy change provides exogenous variation that allows for a test of whether X causes Y.

This Houston Chronicle piece is worth reading.   The new Trump Administration budget calls for eliminating funding for the U.S Chemical Safety Board.   This agency investigates chemical spills.

My new Harvard Business Review piece is based on this recent NBER paper.

Climate change will increase the risk of temperature extremes. Induced innovation could offset some of this threat. This paper explores the demand and supply for climate adaptation innovation in a market economy.

The LA Times has published a fascinating piece pointing to California as an important state where Republicans wield little political clout.

Two years ago, I was chatting with one of the current editors of one of the "top 5" economics journals. I sketched my climate change adaptation arguments and he grudgingly agreed with my optimism (this occurs quite often in private discussions).

Caltrain is a painfully slow train that connects San Francisco to Stanford to San Jose.  This double decker train stops every mile and cruises at a speed of about 25 miles per hour.    Here is  a photo of this bus  on rails.  This train could move faster if the rails are improved.

I remember April 1988 as if it was yesterday.  I had been accepted by the University of Chicago's Economics PHD program and I flew in to the city where I was born to see if I wanted to try my luck at this rigorous PHD program.

Bernie Sanders offers President Trump some advice in this NY Times opinion piece.  The Senator goes on to single out UCLA for making millions from selling a drug patent to a for profit drug company.

Back in 2011,  David Levinson and I wrote a well regarded Hamilton Project Paper called "Fix it First".  In two weeks, I return to Brookings to present my new Hamilton Project Paper.

I continue to work on topics related to China's economic growth. My co-authored 2017 JEP paper and my 2016 Princeton Press book capture many of my past ideas. In this blog post, I'm going to sketch a new idea that I'm working on.

The NY Times has published an interesting piece about Cambridge Analytica that raises several issues related to heterogeneous treatment effects (hang in here for a few sentences!).    The key idea here is "tailoring".  If everyone was 6 feet tall, then a tailor would have an easy job.

Jonathan Eyer and I have released a new NBER paper studying power plant demand for local coal.  Consider a map of the USA featuring circles for every power plant in the U.S and triangles for every coal mine in the U.S.  Each of these power plants might trade with each coal mine.

I'm grateful to my friends at Syracuse University for arranging my Monday book talk.     Our 2016 Princeton Press Blues Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment's first chapter is posted here and our 2017 Journal of Economic Perspectives piece is here.

In my new NBER paper,  I study how the pay of federal and city workers varies as a function of geography.  In this blog post, I would like to sketch the results and explain why this work is mildly interesting.   First, permit me to tell the backstory.