#5 in the 1993 Ph.D Cohort?

REPEC is ranking economists by graduation year.  I like my #5 ranking for the class of 1993.  Perhaps my thesis advisers will now read my dissertation thesis?   I recognize that as more REPEC authors update their profiles and include their graduation year that I'm likely to slide in the rankings but REPEC doesn't include either my Green Cities book or my Climatopolis book (nor my ongoing University of Chicago Press manuscript) or 26 other peer reviewed papers I've written for non-economics journals.  Permit me to list them here from my vita;

Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment published September 1st 2006 by the Brookings Institution Press, ISBN 978-0-8157-4816-8 , 2007 Planetizen Top Ten book of the year.  Translated into Chinese by Tsinghua University's CIDEG in 2008. translated into Farsi in 2011. 


. Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in Our Hotter Future, 288 pages, Basic Books published in September 2010. ISBN 978-0465019267 , translated into Arabic (under the name Matthew Khan). Paperback released in 2013.



  Informal Economies, Information and the Environment, joint with Alex Pfaff, Journal of International Affairs, Spring 2000 53(2) 525-544.



Decentralized Employment and the Transformation of the American City, joint with Ed Glaeser, Brookings/Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs Volume 2. 2001.

The Beneficiaries of Clean Air Act Legislation. Regulation. 24(1) 34-39. 2001.


 Does Sprawl Reduced the Black/White Housing Consumption Gap? Housing Policy Debate, Volume 12(1) 2001.



Civic Engagement in Heterogeneous Communities (joint with Dora Costa), Perspectives on Politics 2003, 1(1) 103-112.

Two Measures of Progress in Adapting to Climate Change, Global Environmental Change, 2003 13 307-312.

Environmental Regional Public Goods in Asia and Latin America. Published in Regional Public Goods from Theory to Practice. edited by Antoni Estevadeordal, Brian Frantz and Tam Robert Nguyen. IADB and ADB. 2004 pages 203-226


The Effects of Urban Rail Transit Expansion: Evidence from Sixteen Cities from 1970 to 2000 (joint with Nate Baum-Snow), Brookings-Wharton Conference on Urban Affairs 2005 Volume, edited by Gary Burtless and Janet Rothenberg Pack.


Air Pollution in Cities, chapter for Blackwell Press Companion Volume on Urban Economics, edited by Richard Arnott and Daniel McMillen. 2006.

Public Health and Mortality: What Can We Learn from the Past? (joint with Dora Costa) , in Poverty, the Distribution of Income, and Public Policy edited by Alan Auerbach, David Card and John Quigley, Russell Sage volume in honor of Eugene Smolensky, 2006.

Environmental Valuation Using Cross-City Hedonic Methods. Chapter Two of Environmental Valuation: Interregional and Intraregional Perspectives. 2006 Ashgate Press book edited by John Carruthers and Bill Mundy.

Green Growth: The Economics of Green Cities published by London's Policy Exchange as an essay in the book Living for the City  



"compensating differentials." The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Second Edition. Eds. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online. Palgrave Macmillan.

"urban environment and quality of life." The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Second Edition. Eds. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online. Palgrave Macmillan.

Estimating Hedonic Models of Consumer Demand with an Application to Urban Sprawl (joint with Pat Bajari) published in Hedonic Methods in Housing Markets Pricing Environmental Amenities and Segregation Baranzini, A.; Ramirez, J.; Schaerer, C.; Thalmann, P. (Eds.) 2008, XXII, 278 p. 26 illus., Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-387-76814-4


Understanding Spatial Variation in Tax Sheltering:  The Role of Demographics, Ideology and Taxes (joint with Bill Gentry) International Regional Science Review 2009, 32(3) 400-423.


Walking the Walk: The Association Between Environmentalism and Green Transit Behavior (joint with Eric Morris), Journal of the American Planning Association, 2009 , 75(4) 389-405. lead article.


Health, Stress and Social Networks: Evidence from Civil War Veterans (joint with Dora L. Costa), Demography, Volume 47, Number 1, February 2010, pp. 45-66.

Harrigan RJ, Thomassen HA, Buermann W, Cummings RF, Kahn ME, et al. 2010 Economic Conditions Predict Prevalence of West Nile Virus. PLoS ONE 5(11): e15437. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015437




 2012 Key Indicators Theme Chapter titled Green Urbanization in Asia  ,  Asian Development Bank (co-author joint with Guanghua Wan).


The Problem with FEMA No One is Talking About ,  Harvard Business Review Blog, November 1st 2012

The Greenness of China’s Cities: Air Pollution and Household Greenhouse Gas Emissions, a chapter in the edited Volume: China's Environmental Policy and Urban Development Edited by Joyce Yanyun Man, 2013 Lincoln Institute Press.


Sustainable and Smart Cities, for World Bank Volume titled Rethinking Cities (co-edited by Ed Glaeser), Chapter 12

China’s Bullet Trains Mitigate the Cost of Mega City Growth (joint with Zheng)  ,  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,  PNAS Plus , March 2013

A Historian's Views on Climate Change Risk

The world is filled with Ph.D historians.  I just had the opportunity to read a long piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by a historian named Geoffrey Parker as he writes about the long history of natural disasters and the risks posed by climate change.

Permit me to provide two direct quotes;

"Nevertheless, it took human stupidity to turn crisis into catastrophe. The meager French harvest of 1675 occurred just as the king raised new taxes to pay for his wars, with predictable results. Many people died of hunger, many more migrated in search of food, and in the west of France, many took part in the "red bonnets" revolts. Most striking were the signs of hardship written on the bodies of survivors. Government officials in France compiled data on each man who enlisted in the royal army, including his height; those born in 1675 stood on average just five feet tall, the shortest cohort of Frenchmen ever recorded."

"As the paleontologist Richard Fortey has observed: "There is a kind of optimism built into our species that seems to prefer to live in the comfortable present rather than confront the possibility of destruction," with the result that "human beings are never prepared for natural disasters." 

Is long run history relevant for thinking about how we will adapt to climate change?  I don't think so.   Our world economy is changing so rapidly that I learn little about our future ability to adapt from 16th century Europe.  That group of people were poor, they weren't educated and they didn't have the technology strategies we have today to cope with shocks and risk.

As I argue in Climatopolis, as our climate changes we will rebuild our cities in relatively safer locations.  We will build with materials and in ways that reduces risks from natural disasters.  We will price scarce resources such as electricity and water so that we use these scarce resources efficiently.  Our entrepreneurs will devise new products to help us cope with the new challenges.  Twitter and Facebook will educate people in real time about emerging challenges.    International markets in food and insurance will help those at risk to smooth risk and to allow people to consume even if their rural agricultural production declines (due to drought and heat waves).   While Dr.  Parker has some interesting things to say, he ignores the role that capitalism plays as an evolutionary force in helping us to adapt to new challenges. He ignores the innovative possibilities of modern capitalism.  By definition historians look to the past, but the economic view of people is that we are self interested and forward looking.  If we anticipate a challenge (or if only a subset of us anticipate that we face a challenge in climate change) then this is a start to finding solutions.   Dr. Parker ignores the facts that the death toll from natural disasters has been declining over time and income shields us from such disasters as urban populations are at lower risk.  He quotes "big damage" numbers but ignores that U.S GDP is $16 trillion dollars.   1 billion/16 trillion =  .000625!

UPDATE:  I see that there are historians who believe that their field is relevant for thinking about our future in the face of climate change.   I respect self pride and I understand self interest but let's do a simple case together.   Back in the 17th century what was the full set of available strategies available to French farmers and consumers of farm products? Compare that to the year 2013,  while I will not endorse GM crops, this provides just one example of the set of coping strategies we have that the French in the 17th century do not. Ongoing technological advance, international trade, and much higher incomes and better storage technology all make past tales of woe irrelevant for today.

Now, I will grant the historians one point in the case of adapting to climate change.  Historians do play a useful role in reminding today's entrepreneurs of these past tales because such misery creates new opportunities for the entrepreneurs who supply the solutions so that future misery doesn't happen.  In this sense, history doesn't repeat itself because people learn from history.   Turner's piece appears to embrace a behavioral economics view that were are doomed to make the same mistakes over and over.  He ends his piece with some optimism about resource constraints;

We should ponder Milton's vision as we debate whether it is better to invest today in preparing for extreme weather, or to face tomorrow the consequences of inaction. After all, unlike our ancestors in the 17th century, we possess both the resources and the technology to make that choice.



9th Week of Spring Quarter

This is the strange time of year when only a handful of campuses are not on summer break.  Stanford, University of Chicago, Northwestern, UCLA and just a few others are on the quarter system.  My students appear to be well aware that it should be summer time.  Attendance is down and students seek to have some fun.  I'm trying to make some research progress on several projects but I keep hitting speed bumps.

I had intended that this blog post would focus on innovative ways that Facebook could simultaneously make money and further academic research.  I thought that I could think of some field experiment designs that Facebook could create.  For example, it could randomly choose people to receive different subsidies if they can recruit their friends to give money for a specific charity.  For example,  Facebook could write me and offer a 40% match on any money raised by my friends to find a cure for baldness.  Facebook could then claim some percentage of the total donations raised as a tax deduction to lower their IRS reported income.   The research design would simultaneously raise $ for good causes and would tease out which people in the population respond to charity incentives and who can be mobilized to convince their network to step up and give to a good cause.

A second new business for Facebook would be for FB to begin to suggest potential spouses for people using their "likes" correlations.  FB could make a number of life suggestions for people such as what they should eat at their next meal. Now I must admit that I'm confused about how FB would be paid for this advice but perhaps they can call McKinsey to provide some advice on how to monetize their advice?

Economic Geography and Weitzman's PBS Discussion

Greg Mankiw's blog nudged me to read Marty Weitzman's PBS presentation.  Marty's work is fascinating but note that there is no spatial component to his work.  He never discusses economic geography. In particular, he implicitly assumes that catastrophic climate change equally impacts every inch of the globe.   Shocks always create "winners" and "losers" and comparative advantage always exists.   The whole world (7 billion people) could live in a geographic area the size of Texas.   We are always building and rebuilding our cities. We continue to use international markets to produce and trade food products.   We continue to invent new storage technologies that allow us to insure against climate shocks. Marty underestimates capitalism's ability to step up to provide solutions to anticipated challenges.   Spatial competition and urban growth is key adaptation strategy.   This is the key reason I wrote Climatopolis.   I also suggest that you papers by Desmet and Rossi-Hansberg, Pindyck, and Costello et. al. 

Two Points About Cities

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been re-reading the roughly 2600 blog posts I have written since 2005.  I owe everyone an apology.  Only 15% of them are good.  Too many of the posts are self serving, and/or silly.    The reason I sat down to read through all of them is that I knew that I did post some good material related to environmental and urban economics and I've now extracted that material and I'm rewriting it into a new free e-book I will release on environmental and urban economics.

From now on, I will be posting less silly stuff.

Two "serious" points about cities.

1.  The Pew Center has posted an intriguing paper quantifying that suburbanites are the big winners from mortgage interest deduction.   The Geographic Distribution of Mortgage Interest Deduction  .  Center city residents are  more likely to be renters (because people live in multi-family buildings and such buildings are more efficiently run by single owners).   So, the tax code is subsidizing suburbia.  If suburban living has a higher carbon footprint, then the IRS is subsidizing climate change.

2. For teachers teaching urban economics, take a look at the LA City Budget Calculator. My proposal increased the deficit.  Maybe I'm a Keynesian!
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