Environmental and Urban Economics

In early June 2020, Baltimore's Democratic Primary will take place and the winner will be highly likely to be elected mayor in November.  Here is a profile of the key candidates.  In this brief blog post, I want to sketch out a few thoughts about Mayors.  What do Mayors do?  They are the city's leader but are they like a CEO?  What powers do they really have?

Perhaps surprisingly, urban economists have not written much about urban elections.  Joe and Fernando have done the best work (see here).    I co-authored a 2017 paper that examined how urban leaders affects the cost of public transit service.   

Candidates for mayor are "differentiated products" that on some abstract level resemble cars or yogurt.  Different cars (Tesla, Honda Civic) are substitutes but are not perfect substitutes.

At dinner tonight, my wife told me that between 1/3 to 1/2 of COVID-19 deaths have taken place at nursing homes. I asked her a Chicago Price Theory question.  I said; "If up to date COVID-19 Nursing home specific death rates are posted, won't private nursing homes devote more effort to reducing their death rate to better compete for customers?"   The net effect of this competition among differentiated products will be lower COVID-19 contagion risk for the elderly who live in these homes.

As American cities enacted indoor anti-smoking laws, smokers responded by smoking outside.  If from now on, we are wearing masks outside --- smoking becomes more inconvenient and fewer people will smoke.  How much future mortality could be avoided by a reduction in smoking?  The CDC claims that smoking causes 480,000 deaths a year in the U.S.