Environmental and Urban Economics

The methodology  yields this ranking.

Top 20

1. Harvard

2. Columbia

3. MIT

3. Stanford

5. Duke

6. Yale

7. Caltech

8. Penn

9. Princeton

10. Cornell

11. Brown

11. UChicago

11. WashU

14. Rice

15. Northwestern

15. USC

17. Dartmouth

17. Johns Hopkins

19. Emory

20. Carnegie Mellon

top 5 LACs:

22. Williams

23. Amherst

26. Pomona

28. Wellesley

30. Swarthmore

top 5 public universities:

25. UCLA

27. UM Ann Arbor

33. UNC Chapel Hill

40. UC Berkeley

43. Purdue

USC is ranked appropriately as is UCLA.   Keep in mind this is a ranking of the college.   USC's students are really good.  They are extroverts, articulate and "fast on their feet".   UCLA featured many more students who crammed for exams and excelled at this "ancient art" but lacked creativity and versatility.

Given the recent discussion about women's opportunities in Silicon Valley and in academic economics, I took a look at my own record.  I have published six books.  I wrote 4 by myself and 2 with co-authors.  Both of my co-authors (Dora Costa) and (Siqi Zheng) are women.  

In terms of journal articles, out of my roughly 130 publications --- I see that I have published 40 papers featuring at least 1 female co-author and I have worked with 10 different women on these papers.

The USC Daily Trojan has published an article that I like.  I moved from UCLA to USC because I saw the private university's momentum and ambition.  My department's goal is to be as good as our football team.  The University aspires to be Stanford.  That's a good goal and we are working to achieve this.  The University of Chicago's economics department has been rewarded for building up a very strong major. Their Deans have invested heavily in that department.

Erin Mansur and I have a well cited 2013 JPUBE paper documenting that energy intensive firms cluster where energy prices are low (the paper has several other ideas!).  Siqi Zheng, Jianfeng Wu and Weizeng Sun and I have a 2017 JUE paper studying China's industrial parks.  In these parks, land, capital and electricity is often subsidized.   The NY Times reports today on an obvious synergy of  these two papers.

As I read the NYT and WSJ, I see similar stories that the Big Data Smart Phone era reduced the suffering caused by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma as people used their phones to "trade with each other" such that private first responders saved many people.  Permit me to ask an economics question, should the suppliers of rescue services be compensated?

They will receive praise but should they receive money?  Uber drivers are paid. What is the difference between Uber and disaster relief?

Titmus vs.

On my twitter feed today, I stumbled across this very interesting (and depressing) post by Claudia Sahm. MIT's great Peter Temin wrote this piece about "culture" 20 years ago.   He discusses Alberto Bisin's early work on culture.   Here is a great Vox EU piece by Bisin on culture that poses some intellectual puzzles for comparative economists.

Dr.

Dating at least back to Dennis Carlton's 1983 RESTAT paper,   economists have written down an indirect profit equation that measures a given firm's profit if it locates in a given geographic area such as Chicago or Nashville.  Suppose there are 87 of these different locations.  A profit maximizing firm will estimate its profit if it opens its headquarters in each of these locations and then choose the location based on the maximum value across these 87 numbers.

Amazon will soon choose a new location for building its 2nd headquarters.  Chicago may be chosen.  The winning city will receive an influx of high paying jobs and this will boost housing prices, human capital, restaurant demand and tax revenues.  Cities are competing by offering tax breaks.  Will Winner's Curse arise as cities over-pay?

Now let me turn to climate change adaptation.

Dr Krugman tweeted this.   I am not smart enough to completely see his thoughts embodied in these 140 characters but I am going to try because this raises a fundamental issue in urban economics.  Below, I reproduce his cross-U.S city graph of log population density as a function of log population. I believe that Dr. K wants you to see that "smart growth" progressive cities are above the regression line while sprawling cities such as Houston, Dallas and Atlanta are below the regression line.