3 Revised Papers

I have not been blogging much lately, but I have been busy with other writing projects.  Over the last couple of months, I've been working with co-authors and today posted revised manuscripts to the web for the following three papers; the first two papers relate rather closely to one another, while the third is part of a very different research program:

1. Household Carbon Emissions from Driving and Center City Quality of Life  (with Matt Kahn)
2.  Household Demand for Low Carbon Policies: Evidence from California (with Matt Kahn)
3. An Agent-Based Model of Entrepreneurship (with Graham Newell)

Below are abstracts for each paper:



1. Household Carbon Emissions from Driving and Center City Quality of Life  (with Matt Kahn) 

In metropolitan areas with a vibrant center city, residents are more likely to live downtown, spend more time downtown and use public transit more.  Due to these factors, we posit that household carbon emissions from the transportation sector will be lower in metropolitan areas with more vibrant center cities.    We use metro level data and household level data to test this hypothesis.  In metropolitan areas where a larger share of college graduates live downtown, the center city’s population grows faster and more people use public transit and drive less.   We document that carbon emissions for a standardized household are lower in metropolitan areas featuring a higher concentration of college graduates living downtown.

2. Household Demand for Low Carbon Policies: Evidence from California (with Matt Kahn)

In recent years, Californians have voted on two key pieces of low carbon regulation.  The resulting voting patterns provide an opportunity to examine the demand for carbon mitigation efforts.    Household voting patterns are found to mirror the voting patterns by the U.S Congress on national carbon legislation. Political liberals and more educated voters favor such regulations while suburbanites tend to oppose such initiatives.   Homeowners recognize the land value effects of these initiatives.  By pricing carbon suburban land becomes less valuable and suburban home owner communities are more likely to vote against such legislation. Home owners who live closer to High Speed Rail stops are more likely to support this legislation.

3. An Agent-Based Model of Entrepreneurship (with Graham Newell)

 This study develops an agent-based model that highlights the role of entrepreneurship in the market process. We explore the effect of entrepreneurial alertness and transaction costs on two normative standards: the speed of price equilibration, and the level of product diversity. Both higher alertness and lower transaction costs lead to faster equilibration, as expected. High alertness contributes to high product diversity, also as expected. However, and counter-intuitively, lower transaction costs actually leads to lower levels of product diversity, as markets equilibrate before entrepreneurs can discover many new products. The analysis provides new insight into entrepreneurship theory and policy.

 

UPDATE: Here is a link to the Netlogo file we used in the published version of the ABM paper.