This NY Times editorial below surprises me. Could the Smart Obama Team really be this bad at basic game theory? I thought that during the Cold War that RAND was paid big bucks for teaching the government strategy lessons in dealing with the Soviet Union. I guess that the stock [...]
I agree with Nat Keohane's main claim here . I read this as a "Field of Dreams" domino effect. If we build it, they (i.e China, India) will follow. The specific details don't really matter. Leadership is leadership. We are trying to shift a perception that the U.S is' [...]
I am happy to hear that China has pledged to reduce its carbon intensity by 40% by 2020 but does this guarantee a smaller global carbon footprint? Recall that carbon intensity = tons of CO2/GNP. China's economy has been growing by 8% per year. Make the big assumption that this [...]
Okay, I'll cry uncle. The Keynesian Multiplier of this government spending is very large. My Dynamic Stochastic GE Model concludes that for every $ that the Department of Energy gives to Los Angeles we generate $3112 of new output and intellectual capital. If you want documentation for how my' [...]
Next week there will be a very interesting energy conference at UC Berkeley. I don't like to travel far from Los Angeles but this is worth the effort. These are very exciting days to study empirical energy questions here in California. When I taught in Boston, I was' [...]
Bloggers are supposed to provide useful links. Each Thanksgiving, I think about the life of the turkey. This website answered many of my questions about the typical turkey's Biography .
Switching subjects and returning to issues that I actually know something about:
Apparently, it is not hard to get into Harvard. Ask these Rats. They clearly were excited about the opportunity to be research subjects in the new Allston labs and came up from below ground to volunteer to be part of randomized trials. They were "rewarded" for their altruism with sharp [...]
Here's a new criteria for ranking research universities; who on your faculty has thought about the broad issue of climate change? Permit UCLA to put its cards on the table. [...]
The Young Men (could any women be writing this stuff?) at www.econjobrumors.com are very funny. Dora and I greatly appreciate their cumulative wisdom. I wish that I had the time and the anger to join them because I could certainly top their remarks but I've reached an age where I'm [...]
The New York Times has a front page article today bemoaning that NYC has an old sewer system that overloads on rainy days. Late in the article, the piece claims that the City has relied on gravity (taking sewage downhill to the treatment facilities) rather than investing in costly infrastructure [...]
For academic economists, there are certain seasons. In early October, we wonder if we will win the Nobel Prize this year. In early November, we wonder whether there are any interesting job market candidates and we click around the various leading departments to see who are the new Ph.Ds being [...]
My neighbor , Candy Spelling, is showing confidence in local housing prices. As a patriotic American, she has not lowered the asking price of $150 million for this Little Holmby House:
I play golf on the golf course just out of sight on [...]
Parents understand backwards induction. We believe that if our child can attend an elite university that this will build his/her human capital, social networks and resume. The fancy university bumper sticker on your car will signal that this kid should and will be part of the meritocratic elite (i.e the [...]
If you had to bet, will China or the USA move first and make a credible commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions? Are there any benefits to being the first mover? Today, the New York Times explains why South Korea has been willing to unilaterally show some leadership on [...]
I know how to conduct a cost/benefit analysis. I gain nothing from the Santa Monica Airport and this UCLA research documents the ambient air pollution costs. I can personally vouch that this airport's planes are noisy. Add the social costs of noise pollution + social costs of the [...]
This blog post on incentives for improving home energy efficiency caught my eye.
"HOME STAR would reimburse homeowners for a range of residential energy upgrades including air sealing, insulation, new light bulbs and household appliances. Homeowners would be eligible to receive up to $2,000 for implementing" [...]
I certainly agree that buildings are major consumers of electricity and I agree that older buildings that were built before more stringent building' [...]
All around the country, other academics feel sorry for their UC peers as we gain some first hand experience with furloughs. Here are the details . You can see our respective pay cuts in % terms and you can see that we have been granted the right to "engage" [...]
Number of comments: 0 David Levine and his buddy Boldrin may have left UCLA a couple of years ago but I hope they are proud of its recent intellectual property . Would this stuff have been dreamed up under the Boldrin/Levine rules? Note that the Economists on campus have produced most of [...]
Number of comments: 0 University Senate meetings are usually not that interesting unless the faculty is in the mood to yell at the President. But, here are some quotes from a Columbia meeting examining the issue of a smoking ban on the main campus.
"Michael McNeil, assistant director of Health Services at Columbia," [...]
Number of comments: 0 Are you a productive citizen? Are you adding more to our economy than this pretty gang ? The "Bling Ring" was smart enough to use the Internet to identify which celebrities live in which LA homes and then to use the Internet to know which celebrities would be out [...]
Number of comments: 0 The LA Times has a sad article today about industrial lead emissions in specific regions in China . The article says that this is direct evidence of the pollution haven hypothesis. As developed countries regulated lead emissions, China grabbed this market and produced lead that is used as [...]
Number of comments: 1 My mother has always liked Mike Cragg so she will be happy to see that Cragg and I are cited in this Lexington Column in The Economist . People have been interested in our work examining the political economy of Carbon voting such as the vote on the June [...]
Number of comments: 1 Terence Tao, a UCLA star math prof, is using his blog as an open source platform to allow countless math nerds to work together on the same paper at the same time.
"After six months and more than 1,000 comments from more than 50 mathematicians, a paper titled “A" [...]
Number of comments: 0 All academic fields have an index numbers problem. To collapse a scholar's lifetime output into a single index of quality, we must agree on how to add up "apples" and "oranges". Do 3 QJE papers = 412 Journal of Junk Food Publications? How much does your star status go up' [...]
Number of comments: 0 As I try to finish the final draft of my new book, I found these letters, from angry New Yorkers who were frustrated by heavy rains knocking out the NYC subways in 2007, to be quite useful. The NY Post captures the voice of "real" New Yorkers. Somehow, the letters [...]
Number of comments: 0 I haven't won any teaching awards and I don't expect to win any soon. I do know a guy who wins these things and he is proud of it and I'm proud of him. But, he could publish more!
Master Clinician: Martin L. Kahn, MD, the Joel E. and' [...]
Number of comments: 0 Evan Smith, an old friend from Hamilton '87, is featured in a photo in the NY Times Business page today . He looks tough in the picture. What has he done? Started a hedge fund? Gone to a tea party? No and No. He has created a new way' [...]
Number of comments: 0 There are some selfless people in the Big City. Here is a very nice story about good luck in a big city. A cynic would say that the cardiologist anticipated that she would get a nice write up in People Magazine but I don't believe this.[...]
Number of comments: 0 Ken Caldeira's opening remarks from his 11/5/09 testimony are reported here. Below, I provide some quotes from his remarks but first allow me to editorialize.
Wikipedia tells us that "Ken Caldeira is an atmospheric scientist who works at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global" [...]
Number of comments: 0 Cement Factories are part of the "old economy". Do they have any place in a "consumer city" such as Brooklyn?
"But Red Hook, a western Brooklyn peninsula known for its rough-hewn docks and their denizens, has been cultivating a gentler, more genteel image for years now, becoming" [...]
Number of comments: 0 Tournaments feature a skewed payoff distribution. Tiger Woods wins much more cash than the runner up. This creates strong incentives to devote effort. Academic Economics can be viewed as such a tournament. Our superstars do the profession a service by opening up their homes and showing what [...]
Number of comments: 1 I am not surprised that the Denver rail's FasTracks is vastly over budget. I am often "railed" against the rising total cost of such public works projects. Voters do have a right to know the final cost of a project before they vote on it. Unfortunately, this type' [...]
Number of comments: 1 An open question in urban economics is whether information technology is a complement or substitute for living in a big city? Does the Internet and the fax machine increase or decrease the demand for living in New York City or Los Angeles? In a well known paper, Glaeser and [...]
Number of comments: 1 I just took the superfreakonomics global warming quiz and as usual scored a B+. Steve says that carbon mitigation will cost us a $1 trillion dollars a year. He is well aware that there is a confidence interval around that number but let's think about that number. [...]
Number of comments: 3 Ed Glaeser makes some excellent points about the suburban subsidy implicit in our tax code: "Yet the tax code encourages Americans to live in big, energy-guzzling homes, instead of thrifty apartments, and Congress seems intent on further unbalancing the federal budget to egg on home buyers."
Number of comments: 0 If you can find people who believe that the world will end in 2012 , then in late 2011 they should be willing to trade you all of their worldly stuff for a small December 2011 payment. It will be interesting to see if eBay's auction volume activity significantly' [...]
Number of comments: 0 Last weekend, I tried (for the 3rd time) to submit a caption for the New Yorker's Cartoon . My quote was; "I am happy to inform you that your head will not roll".
Get it? During this time of recession and job' [...]
Number of comments: 5 Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRKa.N) (BRKb.N) will pay $26 billion to buy out railroad Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp (BNI.N) in what the billionaire investor called a bet on the U.S. economy. Did you know that freight trains have a fuel economy of 400 MPG? That's better than a [...]
Number of comments: 1 Forget the AER, JPE or QJE, if you are looking to read a journal filled with action packed punches and kicks take a look at the Review of History. Now that I've published in it, I wanted to see what other people publish there and it is wild stuff. I' [...]
Number of comments: 1 I hope the smart blogger start talking about the "Lulling hypothesis". Child proof safety caps on medicine lull people into not hiding medicine from kids and kids break into the pills. Diabetic medicines for fighting high blood sugar lull diabetics into thinking they can eat lots of sweets. Will geoengineering [...]
Number of comments: 0 Julian Casablancas, the lead singer of the Strokes, and I do have something in common. Twenty years ago, I had hair like him but not any more. With the rock music scene in Los Angeles, he moved from NYC to LA for a while and really likes it . [...]
Number of comments: 4 Here is a French tragedy of the commons. In a happy utopia, people could share the bicycles through renting them, using them and returning them and this "green transit mode" would reduce vehicle use. But, this has not played out. 80% of the bikes have been stolen or [...]
Number of comments: 2 Tiger Woods needs to use some of his billions offsetting his carbon emissions. Trained for a little while at Stanford, he must have enjoyed playing on this miniature golf course. I know that Stanford has invested a fair bit of money to be a green campus but suppose all [...]
Number of comments: 7 Tyler Cowen notes some relevant trends here . I talk to people and they say that applied micro has suffered over the last 15 years as top Americans have gone to Wall Street rather than the professor route. When I was a graduate student 20 years ago, my [...]
Number of comments: 0 Well, we know we can't screw in a lightbulb but that can be outsourced. Auction theorists know that they have made a difference in the real world. Want proof? Click here . Preston McAfee serves up a very interesting recent intellectual history.
Number of comments: 0 Here is proof that I can publish in a history journal. The Costa/Kahn book was reviewed in a history journal and we were invited to reply. I wish that the Journal of Economic Literature would allow me to respond to Ed Mills' review of my Green Cities' [...]
Number of comments: 2 People in New York City want clean water to drink and access to cheap natural gas. This article highlights the tradeoff. To protect the water supply from pollution at the drill site, the energy company has been pushed not to drill in upper New York State. Given that [...]
Number of comments: 1 In this Economix Piece , Ed remembers a great economist. It is striking that a great man's life can be boiled down to roughly 2000 words. You live for 25,000 days (if you are lucky). At 10 days a word, this piece is a powerful reminder of John [...]
Number of comments: 0 According to this article , Columbia University plans to move some Nobel Laureate faculty from their current Medical School location to a new location. Will this raise or lower productivity of the Medical School as a whole? Presuming that the Nobel Laureates offer positive local spillover effects (is this [...]
Number of comments: 0 We roughly know what economists do all day (teach?, blog?) but what about everybody else? In this interview, UCLA's Richard Ambrose sketches his background and explains why he studies water systems.
Now that I know the modern research university, I still think I would have [...]
Number of comments: 0 James Hamilton has written a great pithy piece on the possible causes of the recent deep recession. As a retired macroeconomist (I dropped out in 1988), I wonder how modern macro guys will figure out how to disentangle the possible explanations that he poses. What calibration exercise will [...]
Number of comments: 0 I woke up at 430am this morning to participate in this debate on Japan's efforts to reduce its CO2 emissions. I'm glad I did it. The other NHK panelists were smart. The challenge is that I do not speak Japanese so the translator was constantly taking my words' [...]
Number of comments: 1 Who said that California no longer creates jobs? Here is a new "green job". Your office will be pretty close to mine and you may actually see me once in a while. In sunny Los Angeles, I mainly work outside but I certainly do appear at the UCLA [...]
Number of comments: 0 If you can read Chinese, my recent interview with China's Energy News may entertain you. If you can't read Chinese, you have to admit that it is still funny. On sunday, I will appear on Japanese television. I will appear in a debate format on NHK tv to' [...]
Number of comments: 0 This would be a difficult field experiment to get IRB approval for! It looks like higher stakes stuff relative to dropping envelopes with cash in the middle of the University quad and asking people to transfer some fraction of this cash to another student who may promise to [...]
Number of comments: 0 What causal factors move public opinion? Are you a fundamentals guy or do you believe in path dependence models so that small shocks set off a contagion/multiplier effect as everybody is talking about the "Octomom" or the "balloon boy". In the Case of Global Warming, has Al Gore's movie worn [...]
Number of comments: 0 The full time cost of commuting by any transit mode (car, walk, bus, subway) has a fixed time cost and marginal time cost per mile. For some facts about these differentials by mode circa 2001 See Table 3 of this paper . Cars have a low fixed time cost [...]
Number of comments: 0 Harvard's John Meyer died yesterday. He was a great urban economist. His combined contributions to urban economics, transport economics and economic history merited a share of a nobel prize. He also served for a decade as the President of NBER (before it moved to Cambridge).
Number of comments: 2 Of course, but what % should go to economics or political science or sociology? The New York Times Arts Section tackles a piece of this issue today. It focuses on political science. Has this field lost its bearings by imitating economics? I don't believe this.
Number of comments: 2 The Sacramento Bee is full of useful stuff. When they aren't publishing my salary, they are highlighting important policy debates taking place in California's Capital (Sacramento). This article on AB32 is a case in point. When a new "big" policy (whether it is health care reform, a war' [...]
Number of comments: 17 Do we address threats ex-ante or ex-post? The anticipated access to ex-post remedies creates a moral hazard effect through lulling. A recent University of Chicago PHD thesis argued that we are getting fatter over time because we anticipate that if we get too fat we can (ex-post) have stomach surgery [...]
Number of comments: 0 Beijing's ambient pollution level depends on the scale of nearby economic activity (i.e cars, people, power plants, factories) and their respective emissions factors (pollution per unit of activity such as emissions per mile). This NY Times article celebrates that the quality of capitalism (i.e greener techniques) is offsetting [...]
Number of comments: 1 Santa Monica drivers will soon be paying much more for scarce parking spots . Will city revenue rise? Will bus ridership rise? Will travel speeds increase? Will air quality improve? Will fewer shoppers appear to go shopping on 3rd street?
Number of comments: 3 You don't want to live near a highway toll plaza, especially if cars get stuck there waiting to pay the toll. This paper presents a "natural experiment" under which EZ-Pass is introduced and a before/after comparison of infant mortality rates in neighborhoods nearby is calculated. Death rates' [...]
Number of comments: 0 Here are the details on this movie star's home. $17 million is a pretty serious price. I was not aware that he lives .9 miles away. I will look for him at the local Starbucks.
Driving directions to Warner Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90024
Number of comments: 0 In case I win the Nobel Prize tomorrow, I wanted to make a couple of points because I could be real busy the next couple of weeks. In today's NY Times, Steve Lohr has a nice piece that will excite Supercrunchers. Cities are sitting on data goldmines. If [...]
Number of comments: 0 Today at the Little Holmby Park, I spotted a guy who I am sure is Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. I was throwing a nerf football with my son and numerous "Star Tour" buses were coming by to gawk at Aaron Spelling's nearby mansion. My intuition told me that [...]
Number of comments: 2 Richard Posner has taught me to worry about big asteroids hitting our planet. I was focused on other concerns (like journal revise and resubmits) until I read his book. As NASA continues to update its probability assessment of the likelihood that this big rock called Apophis will hit our planet [...]
Number of comments: 4 Below, I provide you with a photo of a 7 foot dog. He will play for the LA Clippers this year. This picture got me thinking. I live in Westwood, Los Angeles. Here we have a suburban housing stock but most of the homes have no children living there. Instead, [...]
Number of comments: 1 All economists know that there are too many conferences. Can't we shrink our carbon footprint and cancel 95% of them? That said, tomorrow there will be an real estate/urban economics conference at UCLA. Here are some details. It takes some work to organize one of these things so' [...]
Number of comments: 1 Do you need some good news in your life? Try this . In New York City, Vornado Reality Trust (a major commercial property landlord) is installing small electricity meters into its tenants offices. These sensors will provide data on energy use by 15 minute intervals to some big data [...]
Number of comments: 0 Paul Romer is investigating how the introduction of Charter Cities could improve the economic performance of LDCs. My UCLA colleagues know that I keep talking about Paul's ideas at lunch. On his new blog, he is actively seeking to promote a debate about his ideas. Here is my [...]
Number of comments: 3 This article says that Toyota will soon introduce plug-in hybrids. It claims that these vehicles will be able to travel up to 10 miles on just their electric battery and then each night they would be recharged. So, this means that urban drivers could sharply increase their vehicle's' [...]
Number of comments: 0 Social Security may have an even bigger problem in the year 2109 or so says this news item: Born in 2009 and Living to the year 2109 . How will we discourage seniors from morphing into Grandpa Simpson and instead encourage them to continue to be productive members of [...]
Number of comments: 3 In the 1970s, macro productivity indicators were declining at the same time that EPA regulation was increasing. Some claimed that there was a causal link between these facts. It was claimed that increased regulation lowered business productivity through increasing the labor and capital inputs required to comply with the new [...]
Number of comments: 0 We know that technological change is the key for us achieving the "win-win" of continued economic growth and a clean, climate change free future. How do we accelerate such technological change? The California CEC is trying to force television makers into building more energy efficient televisions by mandating very strict [...]
Number of comments: 0 I am back in LA after 4 flights in 36 hours. I'm glad I went because I had the chance to see my old friends at the University of Kentucky. UK has built up quite a crew of applied micro researchers and there was a lot to talk about. Steve' [...]
Number of comments: 3 I am writing a book about how our cities will adapt to climate change. I'm trying to write a serious book but a book that people might actually crack open on the airplane or in the shower. The New York Times Book Review shows me what they are "good books"' [...]
Number of comments: 1 The Senate will now take up Carbon legislation and it is interesting that Senator Boxer's opening bill proposes more aggressive 2020 carbon cuts than the House Waxman/Markey bill. This surprises me.
But, let's move on.
The NY Times had a nice piece on the water requirements of [...]
The answer to this riddle is explained here and here .
The Prius is not spatially uniformly distributed it clusters in richer, more educated communities but it also concentrates in liberal, dense, walkable and public transit friendly [...]
Number of comments: 0 As an underachiever from the Scarsdale Class of 1984, this new Stanford research by a professor named Minter-Hoxby caught my eye. Charter Schools appear to have a serious Treatment Effect. But, why do they? In thinking about the development of "human capability", the key unobservable is what goes on in [...]
Number of comments: 1 Will Larry Summers comment on the mutual benefits of this globalization? Here is direct evidence of the pollution haven effect at work. As Europe ratches up its pollution regulation, waste is now being exported to poorer nations. Unlike in the case of international trade in manufacturing, there [...]
Number of comments: 0 There are no direct flights from Los Angeles to Lexington, Kentucky. Next thursday, I will have the pleasure of flying through Houston as I try to get to Lexington. I will be participating in this conference on friday 10/2.
Number of comments: 0 Do we have good estimates of the costs of the flu? This article highlights the costs that Stanford Seniors have suffered. Would a hyperbolic model have predicted a riot against the Administration's rules? Will the Stanford class of 2010 donate less $ to the school because they were [...]
Number of comments: 1 To reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, we need per-capita emissions to decline faster than population grows. Given continued world per-capita income growth, how can we reduce per-capita carbon emissions?
My strong Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger argues here that children should not take long hot showers. His thoughts are [...]
Number of comments: 2 Your loyal embedded reporter risked injury to take this exciting picture of an active protest at UCLA:
In contrast, Beijing's leading universities are focused on research and teaching rather than protest. Here was the scariest sight I could see at the Peking University Business [...]
Number of comments: 0 This is an interesting article about how land is being re-allocated in major U.S cities. Even I notice the urban heat island effect created by pavement. Can we share public space? In cities with less income inequality and more ethnic homogeneity, there must be a greater demand for [...]
Number of comments: 0 The New York Times should consider allowing its readers to do the writing on climate issues. These comments are worth reading. [...]
Number of comments: 0 UCLA's faculty have not been that happy about our unexpected paycut. My wife and I have suffered a combined paycut larger that the Chancellor's (but smaller than the basketball coach). But, the UCLA Deans have informed us that we can use our furlough days to generate some more money for [...]
Number of comments: 2 I can barely remember my Hamilton College days. Somehow the mid-1980s are a blur. Perhaps graduate school erased my hard disk. But, this letter that I quote from below makes me proud. The President of Hamilton College is not a Ph.D. economist but she sounds "as if" she is one [...]
Number of comments: 0 This recent UC Alumni Magazine article is worth skimming. The author appears to want to sketch a long run intellectual history of the rise and fall of the Chicago School of Economics.
The article quotes the usual suspects. All are Superstar economists and I enjoyed reading [...]
Number of comments: 1 After two great weeks in Beijing, I have returned to LA. While I couldn't access my blog or anyone else's blog while in China, I was able to post some insights about China at my Planetizen blog . I learned a heck of lot about Beijing and China. I' [...]
Number of comments: 3 As a Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman has earned the right to state his views on the state of macroeconomics. I wish that the New York Times had allowed a couple of the University of Chicago scholars, (Lucas, Cochrane, Fama, Mulligan) who are mentioned in the piece, the opportunity [...]
Number of comments: 0 I leave soon for Beijing. I will read my new email while there but I plan to reply to none of them. I won't bring a computer with me so I'm going to be "old school" armed with just a pad of paper and a couple of pens and a [...]
[...] 
My wife has a full time job. Apparently, we have a son. This sometimes has consequences for my routine.
Your loyal embedded reporter risked injury to take this exciting picture of an active protest at UCLA:
Here's a new criteria for ranking research universities; who on your faculty has thought about the broad issue of climate change? Permit UCLA to put its 
My 
Last weekend, I tried (for the 3rd time) to submit a caption for the New Yorker's 
The New York Times should consider allowing its 
