Environmental and Urban Economics

In New York City, Hong Kong, Shanghai and London and Paris,  rich people live in apartments.  President Trump owns several apartments in Manhattan.  Poor people also live in apartments.

The protests in France over raising gasoline taxes there highlights that middle class people understand that higher carbon taxes have income effects.

The New York Times published an interesting piece about how U.S energy infrastructure might be affected by climate change.   At the end of the piece, there is a nuanced quote about whether the energy companies will experience large profit losses due to climate change.

Rhiannon Jerch is finishing her Ph.D. at Cornell. I serve on her dissertation committee and we have co-authored this JPUBE paper together.  This blog post will discuss her job market paper.

The 2018 Nobel Laureate (Paul Romer) has published a great opinion piece in the WSJ today.    While he doesn't offer a quantitative analysis of how much extra growth we would achieve, he does deliver 3 constructive suggestions for accelerating economic growth.

The Repec rankings are out for October 2018.  In the name of full disclosure, here is mine.  I see that my "strength of students" puts me in the 4th percentile.  I need to improve on that category.   I'm happier with my score in this category.  Here are my peers according to REPEC.

Alfie Kohn has written a provocative opinion piece for the NY Times in which he argues that standard "pay for performance" incentives do not matter and often create a backlash effect.

Paul Sullivan has written an interesting piece that details his investment advice to help NY Times readers continue to earn a good rate of return in a world facing increased climate risk.

Marc Benioff throws a punch at Milton Friedman (calling him "myopic") in his interesting NY Times Opinion Piece today.

While the USC Football team is not playing as well as usual, things are humming along at USC Economics.   On Tuesday October 23rd 2018, USC Economics will host an interesting panel focused on "

The Economist’s Perspective on the Future of Silicon Valley, AI and Innovation".

I am delighted that Bill Nordhaus and Paul Romer will share the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics.  A technical summary of why they have won is posted here.  I am eager to see if Professor Nordhaus engages with Prof.

Kevin Hartnett has written a very interesting piece about the mistakes that AI makes when evaluating the content of a computer screen image.  This matters for many different scenarios such as automated vehicles.

This piece in The Chronicle is worth reading.  The physicist argues that academics have weak incentives to interact with the public.  Academics respond to these incentives by writing esoteric pieces that few can read and understand.

The New Yorker magazine has a very interesting new profile of Mark Z of Facebook.     This piece reminds me of my interest in the issue that Linkedin has been able to avoid all of the recent controversy that Facebook faces.  There are "firewalls" between these firms.

In West Los Angeles, young people zoom around on "the Bird". This electric scooter travels at about 10 to 15 miles per hour and is a substitute for walking, the bus or UberX.

Since August 2017, I have been working hard as the Chairman of USC Economics.  While certain anonymous websites like to beat up on USC,  the department is hiring a new cohort of really good young faculty and we are now ranked #18 on REPEC.

I'm not sure why I signed up for this but I am giving away free lottery tickets to win copies

of my Amazon Book; Fundamentals of Environmental and Urban Economics.

Why has Facebook's stock price fallen sharply?  As I understand it,  Facebook is now offering its users the right to "opt out" and not share their data.  You do not have to be as sharp as Professor James Heckman to anticipate that this will cause a selection bias issue.

Here are some suggested readings for those who want to learn about climate change economics. I name 3 books and one free article of mine.

Labor economists are investigating the role of market power in labor markets as a rising source of income inequality.  Here is a piece from the Washington Post and here is the Krueger and Posner Hamilton Project White Paper.

The economist's model of supply and demand is pretty straightforward but in this brief post I would like to highlight a few twists that urban economics offers.  These twists make urban economics a really interesting (and challenging) field.   Economists are a type of detective.

I have added two more problems and a free version is available here.

I'm going to keep marketing my free e-book.  Here is the Table of Contents listing the problems I present;

1. Trade vs. Autarky

2. The Roy Model of Comparative Advantage

3.  Household Economics

4. Standard Consumption Theory with a "Becker Twist"

5. The Cost of Climate Change

6.

From June 30th 2018 until July 4th 2018, you can download a free copy of my Kindle E-Book here.   These problems are meant to help students build up their intuition.    A special feature of these problems is an emphasis on revealed preference and "partial identification".

I am not sure how these folks create their ranking but I like the fact that USC Economics has a Masters Degree that is ranked #9 in the USA.  Over the last year, we have been MS STEM certified and now we are also creating a new MS degree in Spatial Economics and Data Science.

Here is my revised set of notes.   These problems can be covered in three weeks in either an undergraduate or a graduate class and the students will walk away having a better sense of price theory.

Take a look at the new problem on page 34.  A person gains utility from pizza and from being healthy.

Here is a free copy of my updated set of Price Theory problems.  These are new problems that I have written down based on my memories of Gary Becker and Sherwin Rosen's Price Theory classes from 30 years ago.  I will teach these problems during my 3 week stint teaching Ph.D Micro at USC this fall.

I am looking for somebody to produce a clean set of answers to my 40 pages of questions posed here.   Over the last two weeks, I have written out these questions because I'll be teaching the first part of USC's Ph.D. micro class this Fall.

I live close to UCLA and the streets of Westwood are covered with "The Bird".   These are scooters that travel at a speed of up to 15 MPG and cost $1 to rent and 15 cents per minute of use.  The Bird is produced by Xiaomi (a Chinese company).

USC didn't win the Rose Bowl this year.  USC has been in the news recently.  Despite these setbacks, USC Economics is building up a real strong department.  To give our PHD program a boost (or at least a laugh), I am teaching 6 micro theory lectures this fall.

This is not romantic but it captures some economic logic.

Question:   Risk Smoothing Through the Family vs. The Market

You consume only pizza and you live for at most T years.   

If your consumption of pizza each year ever falls below 4, then you die because of starvation.

The NY Times has published a piece about a new NBER Working Paper that finds that the average judge appointed by a Republican issues more stringent sentences against African-Americans than the average judge appointed by a Democrat.

San Francisco, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland are booming.  Such areas offer great opportunities for our best young minds.

Brad Plumer reports that Alaska's political leaders are crafting plans to reduce the state's GHG emissions.   The piece does not explain "why" these leaders are taking this action.  The piece names a few coastal parts of the state that are at risk of sea level rise and this could certainly occur.

A new law in California will require that every new home built starting in 2020 must have solar panels.   I have studied the housing price premium commanded by solar homes in this and this paper.