Environmental and Urban Economics

As the world's scientists race to find a cure for the Coronavirus, will they work in private labs or will they openly share data and work in an "open source" research environment.  While fame and fortune (the Nobel Prize, billions in drug patents) would suggest the private lab approach, science will make faster progress if they work as "open source hippies".

Suppose that each research team has its own favorite drug treatment.  This treatment consists of injecting m different compounds into a person suffering from the Virus. So, if m=2 --- each treatment can be described by how much of the first attribute and how much of the 2nd attribute is injected into a person to potentially cure the sick person.  Call this (x1,x2).

With some types of machines such as a coffee grinder, it works when you press the button and it doesn't work when you don't.   As aggregate demand for air travel, restaurants and just about everything declines due to virus self distancing efforts, will a short run recession trigger long run negative effects?

An optimist might posit that the coming recession will have little medium term impact because our human capital and physical capital will not change much.

The City of Baltimore has one of the highest murder rates in the United States. The murder rate has remained high since the Freddie Gray riots in April 2015.  Could a sharp reduction in the city's murder rate now take place as a silver lining of the social distancing induced by fear of the Coronavirus?

Here is my logic.   Fear of the Coronavirus nudges people to not interact at close range.  As we spread out and crowds disperse, fewer violent face to face social interactions will take place.

The aggregate contagion risk posed by the Coronavirus declines if more people engage in voluntary social distancing.    Given that social distancing reduces one's own risk of being infected, is this a sufficient incentive to enforce this public health mandate?

Standard microeconomic logic would predict that there will be a free rider problem here as everyone hopes that everyone else will engage in social distancing.

My short answer is “benchmarking”.  In this age of ubiquitous Big Data, how do we benchmark whether a given urban leader is doing a "good job" when imputing a counter-factual is very difficult?  

China’s urban leaders compete against each other to be promoted within the Chinese Communist Party.  In the early years, they competed with respect to urban economic growth.  The leaders of cities featuring a greater economic growth rate were more likely to be promoted in this tournament.