Environmental and Urban Economics: January 2021

The Revealed Preference Approach for Learning Microeconomics

Applied economists are "detectives". We know that we do not know your preferences. If we could learn about your willingness to pay for market goods such as cell phones or for non-market goods such as clean air and safe streets, then both businesses and governments will demand our services. Economists look for clues and design experiments to learn about people. For example, if a person buys a $5 Starbucks drink then we immediately learn that a lower bound on how much she is willing to pay for such a drink is $5. If a week later, when the price is now $7 if she no longer buys it then, we now have learned that we can bound her willingness to pay for this product between $5 and $7 dollars.

Jan

Backwards Induction and the Demise of U.S Gas Stations in the Year 2045

General Motors has announced that it will only produce electric vehicles starting in the year 2035. Suppose that there no more new fossil fuel vehicles purchased by U.S consumers in the year 2035 and going forward. There are 270 million vehicles in the United States right now and most of them are used. This webpage says that 13 million new vehicles are purchased each year in the U.S.

Jan

Platform Competition and the Urban Economics of Free Speech

The New York Times has published an important piece on free speech on American University campuses. I'd like to share some thoughts from the perspective of urban economics.

Back in 1986, I was living in London because I was a Visiting Student at the London School of Economics. On some weekends, I would go to Hyde Park or Regents Park and there would be a small crowd listening to a charismatic speaker standing on a box and he would be talking about Karl Marx or Ms. Thatcher.

Jan

How Can the Biden Administration Boost Quality of Life in Post-Industrial Cities Such as Baltimore?

While every Mayor of a Big U.S city would love to receive an unconditional cash transfer from President Biden, this blog post will not explore this idea.

Jan

Some Rust Belt Urban Economics

In this blog post, I want to market my new co-authored book "Unlocking the Potential of Post Industrial Cities" . I will do this by talking about past research on the Economics of the Rust Belt. Here is chapter one of my book and here is a recent video where I talk about the book.

The most prominent "Rust Belt" economics paper is the 2005 Glaeser and Gyourko paper on Urban Decline and Durable Housing. On a slightly deep level, this paper is about gross flows and sunk capital.

Jan

Free Environmental Economics Lecture Notes and Exam Questions and Access to a High Quality $8 E-book Textbook

I have spent my career publishing in environmental and urban economics. You can look up my Google Scholar page to see that many of my papers are well cited.

Over the years, I have written out a distinctive undergraduate environmental economics textbook that I use in my classes. You can buy the Amazon e-book here for $8.

To encourage Professors to adopt parts of this book in their courses, I provide you with my 350 of my lecture slides for free and many practice exam problems.

Jan

Veblen and Conspicuous Consumption Revisited: The Beneficial Role of "Invisible" Masks During a Pandemic

Suppose that masks are invisible, would more people wear them? Would more supporters of President Trump wear them? How much of the opposition to playing it safe and putting on a mask is due to the economics of identity? To repeat my question, if you could put on a mask but everyone else wouldn't know that you were wearing one, would this increase your probability of putting it on?

Let's review the economics of risk taking.

Case #1: Decision makers who do not have social preferences.

Environmental and Urban Economics