Environmental and Urban Economics

Congratulations to Nick Kristof of the New York Times.  I am really impressed with this discussion between him and Carol in Berkeley.   My mother's name is Carol and she has been to Berkeley and I'm wondering if my mom wrote the following response;

Here is the NY Times Source and my remarks appear below.  

By all means, let’s talk about “personal responsibility”’ — Nicholas Kristof

Carol in Berkeley, Calif., on “Who Killed the Knapp Family?” (Jan. 9):

So long as poverty is seen as an individual or cultural failing (e.g. the culture of poverty which was linked to race, even though the evidence was nonexistent) we will not treat this with the seriousness it deserves. Yes, every individual has responsibility for their lives.

In recent decades, U.S Clean Air Regulations have focused on reducing the emissions of new cars, new factories and new power plants.  Old cars, old factories and old power plants have often been "grandfathered" and haven't faced regulations.  Given the durability of capital, this differential regulation creates long lags between "cause" and "effect". In this case, the cause is the new regulations and the effect is environmental progress.

Post-pandemic many educated people will be working from home 3 days a week.  Some of these people will choose to live further from city centers.  How will such "sprawl" and reduced work trips affect the profitability of ride sharing companies?

For urban economists to be useful here, we need to make some progress on a few core questions.

Several excellent urban economics research teams have access to U.S geocoded cell phone data.  Since I am not part of any of these teams, I will use this blog post to offer them some unsolicited advice.  For some examples of these teams; skim this  and this .  

Geotagged data provide researchers with a spatial and temporal high frequency database to know where each person spends her day.

I carry a cell phone with me 98% of the day when I am awake.  This suggests that I am geotagged.

An active research field in climate economics uses natural disasters as "natural experiments" to learn about the economic effects of such shocks.  Amine Ouazad and I study how major hurricanes impact bank lending and securitization patterns in this study.   Gary Lin, Rhiannon Jerch and I study local public finance dynamics in the aftermath of disasters in this study.    In both papers, our estimation strategy relies on the fact that we have a "treatment group" and a "control group".

The New York Times has published an excellent piece about an emerging coal shortage in China.  Let's use the supply and demand framework to study this issue.  Aggregate demand for coal in China is rising because it is winter and much of the nation's winter heating is supplied by burning coal.  The manufacturing sector is making a comeback and this sector uses plenty of electricity.

Mark Tercek's recently posted an interesting column where he makes the case for why major cash investments in the "blue chip" environmental interest groups is a wise use of Jeff Bezos' funds.

A quote from Tercek;

"When Jeff Bezos originally committed $10 billion to a new climate-focused philanthropic fund, environmental journalists and podcasts immediately began to discuss and debate where the money should go. (See here, here, and here).

This blog post builds on my last post on a related topic.      My critics say to me;  "Matt, our centers of productivity are located in coastal places and these places face ever increasing climate risks.  In a Paul Krugman  style "History versus Expectations" economy, we have built our productive hubs in places that are now under siege and our economy could be wiped out by future punches."  Note that these persistence pessimists downplay the role of Expectations.  Lucas lives on.