Academia
The Talmud and the Endowment Effect
The endowment effect is one of the most important aspects of behavioral economics. It postulates that losing something is worse than gaining something is good. One can easily see it applied to various aspects of property law: it is worse to lose a piece of property that you think is yours than to gain a …
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CONTINUE READINGHarvard Offers A Natural Experiment for Testing Whether Place of Work Determines Where We Live
Readers of this blog are well aware that fossil fuels aren’t correctly priced to reflect the social cost of their consumption. Many economists believe that the U.S gas tax should be at least $1 higher per gallon. In the absence of such Pigouvian Pricing, there is a negative carbon externality associated with living further from …
CONTINUE READINGA New Feast for Environmental Policy Wonks
The Winter 2013 issue of the always-invaluable Journal of Economic Perspectives is just out, and it is a treasure for environmental policy people. It features a symposium on tradeable pollution permits, with contributions from among others William Pizer and Robert Stavins. It not only reviews the history of tradeable permits in air pollution, but also …
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CONTINUE READINGIf the Constitution is Dead, where does that leave Takings?
Justice Scalia is getting a lot of attention for his comment that the Constitution is “dead, dead, dead”, but obviously he didn’t mean that the Constitution is no longer in effect. (See? Intent theory sometimes is helpful, Nino.). Rather, he meant that the Constitution does not have a meaning that changes over time. It has …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s AB32 as a Field Experiment
In modern academic economics, many scholars are running field experiments. I can point you to researchers such as John List of University of Chicago or Esther Duflo of MIT. In this 8 minute video, I sketch the simple economics of why it is very important for someone to run this field experiment for learning how …
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CONTINUE READINGUniversity of Washington Young Environmental Law Scholars Workshop
The University of Washington Law School has issued a call for papers for its 2nd Annual UW Young Environmental Law Scholars Workshop. The workshop will be held July 10-12, 2013, on the UW campus in Seattle. Here’s their description of the event: This collegial two-day workshop features discussion of works-in-progress by ten early career environmental …
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CONTINUE READINGNapoleon Bonaparte, Zoning Administrator
This semester, I am teaching Land Use, and in the casebook I came across this evocative and meaningful quote from Tony Arnold: The real law of land use regulation exists mostly in zoning codes and regulatory procedures, as well as in the actions or decisions of local land use regulatory bodies. Consider all the zoning, …
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CONTINUE READINGAn Introduction to Environmental Economics
I’m a quirky teacher. I don’t use textbooks and I try to focus on real world examples. Here are 30 short videos about environmental economics. Here are all of my course materials for my Winter 2013 Environmental Economics undergraduate course at UCLA. I focus on incentives and empirical hypothesis testing.
CONTINUE READINGTheda Skocpol on Federal Carbon Policy Design
Harvard’s Theda Skocpol provides a compelling narrative and analysis of why Waxman-Markey didn’t become law. In terms of my own empirical work, Kotchen and I document using Google Trends that interest in “global warming” fell in states with rising unemployment rates. Gurney, Zhou, Michael Cragg and I document that Conservative Representatives from high carbon and …
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CONTINUE READINGHow the EPA Saved America
If you don’t follow political blogs, you may not have noticed Kevin Drum’s outstanding story about how the decrease in crime over the last 20 years can largely be attributed to the sharp drops in lead ingestion. When I first heard the theory, I thought it was too good to be true, but Kevin’s story …
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