I have moved my blog over to Substack (and I've lost many readers). Please join me there. Here is a recent column. The Wall Street Journal has published an important piece about how the high heat is reducing economic activity in Houston. The piece has a pessimistic tone that the heat melts the city’s infrastructure and shaves off economic activity as people don’t want to go outside. When microeconomists study consumer expenditure dynamics as people buy cars, go out to dinner and buy groceries. During hot spells, people are less likely to go out for dinner or to play multiple rounds of golf. A ..read more

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. Up front, let me say that I don’t want to discuss the tax code and the nitty gritty of mortgage interest deductions, the GSEs, etc. Instead, I want to talk about why people gain life satisfaction from ownership and what are some of the hidden costs of ownership under our current “rules of the game”. A ..read more

This has been a very hot summer.  For every person on the planet, what is her willingness to pay to avoid this hot summer?  So, on a day when it s 93 degrees on average --- how much is Sally in Seattle willing to pay for this day to have been 78 degrees instead? In a "make versus buy" economy, one can either pay God to not face the 93 degree day in Seattle or one can use a suite of adaptation strategies to cope with the high heat.  Basic economic logic teaches us that one's willingness to pay to avoid the heat is bounded by what it would cost you to adapt to the heat.  &nbs ..read more

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).   The cliche WC story has focused on serendipity and spontaneity that occurs when people casually chat about this and that.   This is not "directed search".   POINT #1;   Pessimists claim that the rise of WFH-HYBRID work will tax the Water Cooler such that organizations will become less ..read more

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.   Given that global greenhouse gas emissions are likely to continue to rise as the world’s population and per-capita income grows faster than the decarbonization of the world economy (declining GHG emissions per dollar of GNP), the climate change challenge will grow more severe over time.  New climate risk modelling firms ..read more

 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. Marianne Andries  Tim Armstrong Vittorio Bassi Augustin Bergeron Fanny Camara  Thomas Chaney Pablo Kurlat Jonathan Libgober Robert Metcalfe Monica Morlacco Afshin Nikzad  Paulina Oliva Simon Quah  Jeffrey Weaver  David Zeke In July 2022, a star theorist will join our department as our newest hire. USC fascinates many people.  This list highlights that the hype about us is earned.  ..read more

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.   How many of us have compromised as we live in a place because our work is nearby?  Going forward, a silver lining of the pandemic is that more and more of us will have the option to live where we want to live as we engage in WFH on either a part-time or full time basis.  How will this new freedom affect our quali ..read more

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". Why did I write these 600 total pages of stuff? The Ongoing Challenge faced by Baltimore, Cleveland and Detroit I spent two years working at Johns Hopkins University and I lived in downtown Baltimore for a year before the pandemic hit.  I wrote the Unlocking book because I recognized that I was living i ..read more

 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.  Instead, I will discuss how flood risk (ex-ante) and flooding affects the real estate market and the distribution of income.   In an increasingly risky economy, who should own the risky assets? When one owns an asset, there is uncertainty about how the price of the asset will change over time.  A share of Tesla can either rise or fa ..read more

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.  Each has graduated from High School and each is considering applying to the University of California.  The students differ that some are Asian and some are Hispanic.  To simplify, let's assume everyone is a member of one of these two groups.   The researcher observes that 72 ..read more