Environmental and Urban Economics

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.

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.

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.

This has been a very hot summer.

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).

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.

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.

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".

The New York Times has published a good opinion piece by a Professor of English on the unintended consequences of federal subsidies and regulations for living in flood plains.

In this brief piece, I am not talking about surviving a flood.

This will be a "big think" blog post that shares my thinking about this March 2022 Nature Human Behavior paper titled "The data revolution in social science needs qualitative research".

Permit me to focus on one example.  Consider a sample of 5,000 equally talented and ambitious 18 year olds.

While I don't write best selling books, I do like my books!  Amazon sells them here.  In April 2022, my Going Remote book was published.  This book studies the urban and labor economic issues related to persistent Work from Home (or work from anywhere) going forward.

Most economists do not write books.  The profession does not reward book authors and not every book sells like Freakonomics or Why Nations Fail.

China features state owned enterprises (SOEs) that pursue a "double bottom line".  They simultaneously seek to earn profit and to please the powerful Central Government.  Relative to their private sector counterparts, these Chinese SOE firms receive special treatment.

The new issue of the Economist includes an excellent Free Exchange column titled Lose-Lose Ordeal with the heading; "New research counts the costs of the Sino-American trade war".

An excellent new NBER Working Paper titled "Mandated vs. Voluntary Adaptation to Natural Disasters: The Case of U.S Wildfires" has been published.

The media keeps running articles that Greta Thunberg and a majority of the world's young people worry that "society is doomed" because of climate change. I understand that they seek to create a political movement to enact a global carbon tax.

The Washington Post has published a piece stating that the Secretary of Transportation, Peter Buttigieg, is the big winner of the Biden Infrastructure Bill as he will be attending many ribbon cutting ceremonies as grateful local mayors shake his hand.

Bill Gates argues that we were insufficiently prepared for COVID-19.

A few thoughts about the pending Infrastructure Bill.

What Criteria Will be Used to Allocate the Money?

An efficiency criteria would state that it should be allocated to those places and on those projects within such places that offer the greatest economic and quality of life impact.

Imagine if there is an infectious disease that spreads within cities but not across cities.   Throughout the COVID crisis, the city specific infection rate has varied across cities at each point in time.

My wife and I own a well known Electric Vehicle that monitors our driving in Southern California.

Politico reports on the policy challenge that the Biden Administration faces.  There are thousands of Haitian immigrants living in squalid conditions under the Del Rio International Bridge.

A dynamic incentives issue arises.

The Biden Administration has made an announcement that it seeks to protect outdoor workers from extreme heat exposure.   What does the theory of compensating differentials in real estate markets and labor markets teach us about exposure to high temperatures.

I maintain two assumptions.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is opening retail stores in cities.  On one level, this poses a puzzle because Amazon's rise was fueled by its cost savings due to the fact that it is a virtual store.  Over the decades, Amazon has assembled a huge database about each of its customers.

In a series of pieces, I have explored how the for profit insurance industry can accelerate climate change adaptation progress. Here is my recent RMS interview. Here is my 2017 co-authored Harvard Business Review piece.

A few months ago, I posted a Twitter tweet about how to use REPEC data to rank academic couples.  I followed a symmetric transparent method.  My criteria takes the REPEC Ranking for one spouse + REPEC ranking for the other spouse.  I treat them as equals.

Across all of the world's economists;

#9 in Environmental Economics

#25 in Urban economics

#4 in Resource Economics

#27 in Energy Economics

John Cochrane recently posted an important blog post sketching out his claim that climate change will only have a small impact on world GNP over the next 75 years.   He argues that the trend growth (3% growth for 60 years) will swamp the effect of climate change).

Consider a University of Chicago Econ 301 homework assignment situated in Summer 2021 in the American West.

"You own a $500,000 home in a fire zone in the American West.  You owe $X on your mortgage.