Region: International

Going Global with CBA

For those who are not fans of CBA, its international spread may seem like a worrisome possibility. But for environmentalists, CBA may work out better than it has in the United States.

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Chinese Willingness to Pay for Clean Air

In joint research with several of my friends, in this recently published paper  we use cross- Chinese city data on real estate prices and ambient air pollution to measure the rent premium in cleaner cities.   The benefits of any environmental regulation hinge on its causal impact on ambient pollution and on how much people value …

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Finally Cleaning Up In the Galilee

Residents of northern Israel got a welcome victory a couple of days ago: the nation’s High Court held that Eitanit Construction Products, a politically well-connected firm that polluted cities across the region with asbestos, must pay half the cost of cleaning it up. Friable asbestos contaminating whole cities might be a dim memory in the United …

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US Food Aid Rules: If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention

The Obama Administration announced yesterday that it wants to change US food aid rules to allow for more “local procurement” of food aid in the countries that need it.  Predictably, the special interests are aghast.  But the administration is right: current food aid rules are among the most egregious special interest legislation in the world …

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Clear Views in the High Desert

If you are looking for a politically progressive city, Lancaster, California would not make it on your list.  Located in the deeply conservative Antelope Valley of north Los Angeles County, it has attracted attention by, inter alia, 1) electing Pete Knight, one of the most vicious anti-gay politicians in the country, to a series of state …

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Climate Adaptation and the Two Chinas (and the Two Brazils, and the Two Indias….)

The world used to be divided into developed countries and developing countries, but a third group has now taken the stage: emerging economies like China, India, and Brazil that are growing very rapidly but haven’t yet attained developed country status.  But development in these countries is uneven.  In China, for example, there has been explosive …

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Remedial Education for Berkeley Law Faculty

Or at least for John Yoo, who argues: Courts award damages based on the harm to the victim and the harm to society. Suppose you thought that the Iraq war was a mistake. If so, isn’t the proper remedy to restore Saddam Hussein’s family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq? If you are …

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Congress Increases Climate Research Funding!

…even if they didn’t intend to. The Republican War on Science has morphed into a more general war on knowledge.  As Dan has pointed out previously, the GOP has now declared war on social science funding, and particularly on political science. Last night, the Senate accepted the amendment of Senator Tom Coburn (R – Olduvai …

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The Impact of China’s Bullet Trains

Siqi Zheng and I have just published our bullet trains paper in PNAS.  Here is the gated paper.    Our empirical paper is based on the following piece of deep math;  distance = speed*time.    Given how fast bullet trains move relative to cars and conventional trains, the time cost between cities that are 80 to …

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The Sandwich and Urban Pollution Progress in China

The principal-agent problem is a classic issue in modern economics.    Consider the case of a Chinese Mayor who must choose whether to enforce regulations on a local steel plant.  Pollution would decline if this regulation is enforced but the profits of the firm might fall and this could affect the local economy if the …

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