Tomorrow, the University of California Press will publish my Going Remote book.  In February 2021, Johns Hopkins Press published my Co-authored "Unlocking the Potential of Post-Industrial Cities" and in March 2021, Yale University Press published my book; "Adapting to Climate Change".

Why did I write these 600 total pages of stuff?

The Ongoing Challenge faced by Baltimore, Cleveland and Detroit

I spent two years working at Johns Hopkins University and I lived in downtown Baltimore for a year before the pandemic hit.  I wrote the Unlocking book because I recognized that I was living in a city that was stuck in a poverty trap. Very few people were actively thinking about the basic building blocks of economic growth namely attracting productive firms, encouraging private capital investment in firms, and upgrading old durable real estate capital. Young people were not investing in their skills because there were few local private sector jobs.  The basics of building a high quality of life city focused on improving school quality and safe streets and clean air and clean water were not being fully addressed as Baltimore's officials showed little interest in experimentation and formal evaluation of different program's effectiveness.  

Adapting to Climate Change

My book is an optimistic study as I synthesize what I have learned over my 15 years of researching and reading the climate change economics adaptation literature.   

Name any climate change challenge you can think of ranging from sea level rise, to extreme heat, to increased fire risk and I discuss how capitalism helps us to adapt to the challenge.  For capitalism to help us to adapt, prices must be allowed to signal scarcity. If drought occurs, water prices must rise. If real estate in a specific location faces new risk, then the price will decline and the new buyer will be a person with an edge in adapting to the risk.  Such an edge can be built up through developing skill or if there is sufficient demand to protect properties that can flood then it becomes profitable for firms to enter the "flood protection" business to protect such home owners.  As we learned from the development of the COVID vaccine, our economy features amazing adaptation potential.

Climate adaptation optimism is still viewed as politically incorrect stuff.  Why?  Through rising incomes, access to markets and rising educational attainment, our ability to adapt to new shocks increases every day.  

Going Remote

This is a book about the urban and environmental implications of the persistence of WFH in a post-COVID economy. I argue that the "experience good" effect that we enjoyed during COVID will offer huge medium term gains for our quality of life going forward.

Cities such as Baltimore will experience an influx of WFH workers as people who want to live in that city because they desire its affordable housing and culture and lifestyle can now live and have a good job as they work for a Amazon HQ2 or HQ3 of Google in a 2 hour drive in some direction.   The unbundling of where we live from where we work will help cities that have failed to attract modern companies to make a comeback if they offer good services and good quality of life.  If a Baltimore attracts more talent to live there, then this will stabilize the taxbase and increase the demand for the local Consumer City. This will create a service sector multiplier effect and increase opportunities for those workers who are not WFH eligible.   As young people foresee that they can be WFH workers if they have the skills, they will invest more in themselves and their parents will seek better schools for them. This will put pressure on the local public sector unions to teach!

So, there is a clear link between my Unlocking book and the Going Remote book.

The link to climate change adaptation is that a WFH eligible workforce can spread out. For those who seek to work for a Seattle firm but fear how climate change will impact Seattle, they are free to choose and "head for the hills".  The permutations become huge when you can work for one firm and live elsewhere.  Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" becomes a more accurate description of our economy and this increases our wellbeing.

In 2019, the great jobs were in congested, expensive Superstar cities that faced increased climate risks.  WFH unbundles where we live from where we work and opens up many, many possibilities for how we configure our lives.  This represents a significant real pay raise!

I am not a modest man. I view my three books as creating a series of empirical predictions for how the urban system of cities will unfold over the next decades.  I would hope that my teacher Sherwin Rosen would respect how I have taken his hedonic equilibrium ideas and built on his edifice.  




Dear Readers, In recent months, I have posted my public writing to my free Substack. I have such fond memories of Google Blogspot, thus it deeply surprises me that Google's search engine does a terrible job in helping those who search to find past blog posts. This deeply surprises me. As I age, I'm trying to post more dignified material to my Substack. I am sticking to what I know based on my ongoing research in microeconomics. Thanks very much for reading my posts. Best Regards, Matthew E.

I have moved my blog over to Substack (and I've lost many readers). Please join me there. Here is a recent column. The Wall Street Journal has published an important piece about how the high heat is reducing economic activity in Houston. The piece has a pessimistic tone that the heat melts the city’s infrastructure and shaves off economic activity as people don’t want to go outside. When microeconomists study consumer expenditure dynamics as people buy cars, go out to dinner and buy groceries.

The New Economic Geography of WFH Matthew E. Kahn Over the last three years, companies from all over the world have learned valuable information about how their firm’s productivity and worker satisfaction is affected when workers can engage in Work from Home (WFH) on at least a part-time basis. Each firm faces fundamental tradeoffs in not requiring workers to return full time to the office. On the one hand, WFH accommodates worker lifestyles and responsibilities at home.

A majority of American adults live in owner occupied housing. As an economist, I celebrate the logic of revealed preference. While many poor people are renters, many non-poor people reveal that the benefits of ownership exceed the costs. In this entry, I would like to delve into the details here. Up front, let me say that I don’t want to discuss the tax code and the nitty gritty of mortgage interest deductions, the GSEs, etc.

Climate change adaptation refers to our individual and collective ability to cope with Mother Nature’s more intense weather punches in terms of extreme heat, drought, fire, flood and many other place based risks. My microeconomics research, as sketched out in my 2010 Climatopolis book and my 2021 Adapting to Climate Change books, argues that capitalism accelerates our ability to adapt as market price signals encourage substitution and innovation.

This has been a very hot summer.  For every person on the planet, what is her willingness to pay to avoid this hot summer?  So, on a day when it s 93 degrees on average --- how much is Sally in Seattle willing to pay for this day to have been 78 degrees instead?

In a "make versus buy" economy, one can either pay God to not face the 93 degree day in Seattle or one can use a suite of adaptation strategies to cope with the high heat.

Is face to face interaction over-rated?   I am not talking about participating in the service economy (i.e getting a haircut), romance, friends and family interaction. I am talking about workplace face to face interactions and the vaunted "Water Cooler" (WC).  

The cliche WC story has focused on serendipity and spontaneity that occurs when people casually chat about this and that.   This is not "directed search".

Millions of American workers engaged in Work from Home (WFH) during the pandemic.   WFH helped us to adapt to the risk of disease contagion.  Going forward, WFH will also helps us to adapt to the rising climate risks we now face.

I joined the USC Economics faculty in 2015 and Romain Ranciere also joined that year.  Permit me to list the impressive scholars who have subsequently joined our faculty.

Marianne Andries 

Tim Armstrong

Vittorio Bassi

Augustin Bergeron

Fanny Camara 

Thomas Chaney

Pablo Kurlat

Jonathan Libgober

Robert Metcalfe

Monica Morlacco

Afshin Nikzad 

Paulina Oliva

Simon Quah 

Jeffrey Weaver 

David Zeke

In July 2022, a star theorist will join our department as our newest hire.

The Los Angeles Times rejected my piece that I present below.  Of course, I'm trying to sell my new 2022 Going Remote book!!

The New New Geography of Jobs

LeBron James joined the Los Angeles Lakers in 2018.  He wanted to live and work in Los Angeles.
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