Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Changing Character

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I live in a very pleasant suburb of Los Angeles called Pasadena.  Many of you will know it from the Rose Parade and Bowl.  But it also has ...
Sunday, August 28, 2016

Aesthetics and Cost

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I grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which sits at a particularly beautiful spot on the Mississippi River.  It is in the middle of an area ca...
Thursday, August 11, 2016

Capital and New Construction

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Bankers like to complain about Basel III capital rules. Among other things, they argue that the rules make construction lending more expen...
Monday, August 08, 2016

Use up-zoning, but don’t give it away

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Los Angeles has three interrelated issues: for a city of its size, it is not, by world standards, very dense (see Figure 1.  The pictures o...
Thursday, August 04, 2016

Heather Schwartz, Raphael Bostic and I write about renting in NOLA

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The piece is here . ... Between 2000 and 2014,  our analysis   — which we performed for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation...
2 comments:
Sunday, July 31, 2016

Is Free Trade Good for Everyone? (Reposting, because it seems relevant right now).

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Greg Mankiw implies that it is (although not anymore ), and that all economists agree that it is.  But it actually isn't.  Who says so...
1 comment:
Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Thoughts from California about a year in Washington

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The nice people I worked with at HUD asked me to write a short piece reflecting on my year there . Five Things I have learned from a yea...
Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Housing now

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From HUD's The Edge . This past fall, the state of housing reached something approaching normalcy in some dimensions (new constructio...
Tuesday, October 13, 2015

A book that changed my life

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" We believe that the confounding of the aggregate with  the individual   is as dangerous as it is pervasive...."  Page 81.
Sunday, August 16, 2015

Apartments, Energy and Bad Incentives

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I am spending this academic year working in Washington working at HUD, so I am renting an apartment here.  When I signed the lease, I under...
Thursday, March 12, 2015

LA has zoned itself out of the ability to house its residents (h/t Matthew Glesne)

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Once upon a time, the zoning in Los Angeles would have allowed for 10 million residents to live within its municipal boundaries.  Greg Morr...
Thursday, February 26, 2015

It is hard to feel urban form sometimes.

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I have spent a fair amount of time in Sao Paulo over the past 3-4 years, and always thought it sprawled more than LA, because it takes fore...
Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Should Finance Departments Pay Pigou Taxes?

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The Economis t leads me to an article by Stephen G Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi :   The purpose of this paper is to examine why financ...
Sunday, February 15, 2015

One reason to worry about US inequality...it is really bad for our babies.

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My colleague Alice Chen , along with Emily Oster and Heidi Williams, have a new paper that explains differences in the infant mortality ra...
1 comment:
Thursday, January 29, 2015

No comment necessary

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The Violence Policy Center put out a press release this morning relating gun ownership rates to gun death rates.  I wrote to them asking f...
2 comments:
Monday, January 26, 2015

Cities and the Environment--A first order effect?

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I was reading a story about peak driving over the weekend.  In the course of reading the story, I discerned that we here in California dri...
1 comment:
Monday, January 19, 2015

How choosing the right discount rate matters to Max Scherzer

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My student Hyojung Lee sent me to a cute article about how Max Scherzer's $210 million contract is not really a $210 million contract....
3 comments:
Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Is Houston really vulnerable to recession? {Updated answer: maybe}

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So after reading Paul Krugman's prediction that Texas was vulnerable , I did two things I should have done before. First, I looked to...
Monday, December 29, 2014

The limits of knowledge in economics, Part V

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How much does it cost you to live in your house?  If you are a renter, the answer to that question is fairly straightforward (although if y...
Saturday, December 27, 2014

Is Houston really vulnerable to recession?

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My inbox is filling up with dire warnings about the near-term future of Houston's economy.  After all, the price of oil has dropped by ...