Most economists do not write books. The profession does not reward book authors and not every book sells like Freakonomics or Why Nations Fail. In truth, most economists do not read books and most view economics books to be indulgent as the author writes out thousands of words rather than cutting the fat, facing the referees and making his/her point concisely. The incentives of academic economics also rewards economists for presenting their main regression and writing up the results or writing down their model and solving it. Synthesis work isn't rewarded. "Big Think" is viewed as pretentious and best left to when one is in the shower or in an AEA Presidential Address. We are supposed to be humble and modest!
Taking all of these facts as true, I want to sell my four Amazon e-books. My grandfather was a shoe salesman and I am a salesman.
#1 Fundamentals of Environmental and Urban Economics -- When I was a professor at UCLA, I was tenured at the Institute of the Environment (IOE) and IOE featured students with an "environmental studies" perspective. Many of these students had never studied economics and were generally suspicious that free markets improve our quality of life. I took my environmental economics lectures, for this undergraduate course that was cross-registered between the IOE and the Economics department, and wrote them up. I am encouraged by the fact that several environmental economics professors around the world have adopted this book as their course textbook. At USC, I use this book when I teach undergraduate environmental economics. At the same time, anyone can read this book just as "a book". So, it is an unusual book that it is both a textbook and a non-fiction book. I think it features plenty of ideas that continue to be relevant for thinking about the "chicken and egg issue" of how economic growth affects the environment and how the environment affects economic growth.
#2 An Introduction to Empirical Microeconomics This is the weakest of the 4 books but it is the most daring. I taught Econ 101 one quarter at USC Economics. I made a conscious decision to take some risks. Of course, we covered supply and demand and most of the usual big ideas from basic micro but I also chose to spend a lot of time on revealed preference.
Consider the following example. A researcher posits that people gain utility from taking leisure and eating pizza. The price of pizza is $1 a slice. There are 24 hours in the day. Here are some data about this person's daily choices over leisure and pizza consumption. Keep in mind that her budget constraint is: Wage*(24-hours of leisure) = pizza as 24-hours of leisure = hours worked. So, to keep this simple, she has no other bills to pay and she can't borrow or save. Here are some data.
Wage Hours Worked Leisure Pizza Consumed
14 10 14 140
18 9 15 162
20 8 16 160
From exogenous variation in daily wages, and then observing her leisure and pizza consumption choices, what do you learn about her willingness to tradeoff leisure for pizza? An economist recognizes that we are trying to pin down the slope of her indifference curves from observing her choices. My book solely focuses on these "detective problems". Permit me to give one example of how to solve these problems. When her wage goes up from 18 to $20 an hour, if she continues to work 9 hours she would enjoy 180 slices of pizza but she didn't choose that bundle. Instead she chose to only work 8 hours per day. She reveals that she is willing to sacrifice 18 slices of pizza to have 1 more hour of leisure per day. This is a lower bound on what she is willing to pay for leisure at that point.
In my book #2, I argue that the right way to teach Econ 101 is to start from observed behavior and behavioral change (in this case as wages change --- how does the worker change her behavior) and then invert back what we learn about a person or the people in an economy.
#3 Price Theory Problems Back in the Fall of 1988, I took Gary Becker's Econ 301 PHD class at the University of Chicago. This was a time before power point and even the Internet. Each week, a highly challenging and strange homework would be handed to the class. Unlike typical first year PHD homeworks, these problems were not cut and dried. The questions were loose and required plenty of thinking. While I don't have my old homeworks, I do have memories of the problems and the question frame that Professor Becker tried to stir up. In writing out these problems, I'm not recycling old stuff. I'm trying to show both undergraduates and PHD students how to think in the price theory tradition. I believe that to be a successful economist requires several skills and that the Price Theory approach merits more attention than it currently receives.
#4 An Introduction to Urban Economics My most recent e-book. In fall 2021, I gave some really good USC Economics Econ 367 undergraduate urban economics lectures and I gave them on Zoom. This allowed me to have access to a set of transcripts of what I said in class. I took these transcripts and completely rewrote them into this book. In my humble opinion, most urban economics texts are sort of boring. Similar to Book #1, I have created a hybrid book that can either be read as non-fiction or used as a textbook. My book has several features that other books don't have. It explicitly discusses empirical methodology for testing hypotheses. It discusses the climate change and urbanization challenge and it devotes attention the political economy of urban externality challenges. It also has a pretty good chapter on cities in the developing world and weaves in my ideas about how Work from Home will affect different cities.