Every May, I grow tired and bored. This year is worse than usual. I'm teaching too much and I not hearing enough new ideas from my colleagues. In search of new stimulation, I've made a strange choice. Nils Kok and I have agreed to write a textbook at the intersection of real estate finance and investment, urban economics, energy economics and environmental economics. While there are some good texts for each of these subjects, I've gotten excited about how to write a book at the MBA/PHD/Masters in Public Policy level that covers our thinking at the intersection of these four subjects.
The typical MBA doesn't fully appreciate the power of microeconomics as a tool for understanding the world and for making money. The typical Ph.D is all tooled up but doesn't have a clue about what are interesting "doable" research questions. The typical Masters in Policy student is often suspicious of free market forces seeing them as a cloaked way to transfer income from the 99% to the 1%. This book will have a lot to say to all of these groups.
The perceptive reader will see how basic University of Chicago price theory and simple econometric tests can be used in tandem to make a number of interesting statements. This book will highlight the power of free market ideas as a force for promoting environmental protection and improving urban quality of life. This project has jolted me back to life. Once we are done, we will simply give the book away basically for free as an "E-book". We are on pace to finish this project by December 2013.
The point of this blog post is not merely to boast about what I will do. If you are an altruist, or if you are an under cited researcher, please send me your relevant research and I will read it to see if your work should be bundled into this endeavor.
