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Matthew E. Kahn is a Provost Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. He has taught at Columbia, the Fletcher School at Tufts University, UCLA , and Johns Hopkins University. He has served as a Visiting Professor at Harvard, Stanford and the National University of Singapore. He is a graduate of Hamilton College and the London School of Economics. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He has published several books. He is married to Dora L. Costa.
Curriculum Vita (as of 2026) contains web links to almost all of my publications.
My Google Scholar Page and my REPEC Economics Rankings Page,
Email: kahnme@usc.edu
X at @mattkahn1966
I am on academic leave from USC from May 2026 until September 2027.
Aging from 1988 to 1996 to 2009 to 2019 to 2022
Renewal in 2024? A photo highlighting aging from January 2025 . An AI Drawing of Me Based on 3 Photos
Here are some of my Climate Change Economics Videos and here are some of my Economics Lecture Videos.
Popular Media Coverage (out of date) , Here are some of my recent podcasts discussing urban and environmental issues.
For a price of $0, you can subscribe to my Environmental and Urban Economics Substack where I post columns.
This Substack has replaced my popular Environmental and Urban Economics blog.
In August 2025, I have created a Google LM Notebook that people can access to learn about four of my books (Introduction to Urban Economics, Economic Growth and Environmental Progress, An Introduction to Natural Disaster Economics, and Fundamentals of Environmental and Urban Economics). The material is posted and you can ask your questions and study the material on environmental and urban and natural disaster economics. I am incorporating AI into my teaching, research and outreach.
New Research Papers as of June 2026
New Research Papers as of June 2026
Tesla Purchases and the Acceleration of Luxury Durable-Goods Filtering
Matthew E. Kahn
Abstract
New vehicles are consumed disproportionately by higher-income households, while older vintages are resold and gradually filter through secondary markets. In recent years , Tesla adoption surged among affluent households, many sold relatively new luxury internal-combustion-engine (ICE) vehicles. Using vehicle registration data for California ZIP codes in 2018 and 2025, I study this filtering process and document three facts. First, Tesla adoption is strongly concentrated in high-income communities. Second, older luxury vehicles become substantially less concentrated in high-income communities over time. Third, ZIP codes experiencing the largest increases in Tesla ownership experienced the largest declines in older luxury ICE vehicles. These results suggest that supply-side quality shocks to new products generate welfare gains beyond the initial purchasers by accelerating durable-goods filtering through secondary markets.
Matthew E. Kahn
Abstract
What do climate-growth regressions identify: responses to statistical shocks or to real-time information guiding adaptation? Bilal and Kanzig (2026) construct shocks as residuals from full-sample Hamilton (2018) projections. These shocks embed future realizations unavailable to agents at time t-1. Such shocks are ex-post statistical objects rather than real-time information innovations. This distinction has first-order implications for inference: full-sample procedures introduce non-stationary measurement error that can distort estimated climate damages and sharply reduce statistical power to detect learning-driven adaptation. By contrast, recursive forecast errors constructed using only information available at time t-1 put the econometrician and the economic agents on equal footing. Monte Carlo simulations and a re-examination of the Bilal and Kanzig (2026) data demonstrate that empirical conclusions about climate damages and adaptation depend critically on how shocks are defined. Recursive shocks yield smaller point estimates and less precisely estimated effects, but produce positive (though statistically insignificant) coefficients on the climate-shock × trend interaction that are directionally consistent with learning-driven adaptation over time.
Matthew E. Kahn
Abstract
Roughly 25% of older Americans have diabetes. OLS estimates indicate that diabetes is associated with a roughly ten percentage point reduction in employment and this effect has been constant for decades. Estimating its causal effect is challenging because diabetes is correlated with health behaviors and early-life conditions that also shape labor market outcomes. Using thirty years of data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), I implement an imperfect instrumental variables (IIV) approach to bound the causal effect of diabetes on employment. I study how these bounds evolve across the decades using smoking as an IIV. I justify this choice using a life-cycle model and a first stage statistical test. For men, smoking-based bounds are informative in all waves and consistently imply upper bounds much closer to zero than the corresponding OLS estimates, ruling out large negative causal effects and suggesting that selection plays an important role in explaining the core correlation.
Matthew E. Kahn
Abstract
For decades, undergraduate economics educators have followed a well-worn playbook featuring textbooks, lectures and problem sets. Students have passively listened, taken notes and studied for exams. AI disrupts this educational process. Some students are using this tool as a substitute for their own precious time. What is our best response? This paper provides a prospective analysis of how to restructure every phase of the undergraduate economics experience to improve the major and better prepare students for their uncertain future.
Matthew E. Kahn
Abstract
Two finance experts have written a general interest book and provide a masterful overview of the challenges that middle class households face as they participate in financial markets. Based on their reading of the evidence, they recommend a highly paternalistic set of public policies that dovetail with Senator Elizabeth Warren's worldview. A latent pessimism lurks in their work. I present a human capital model that generates very different predictions about how to adapt to the challenges that the authors have documented.
New e-Books!
New e-Books!
Matthew E. Kahn
Using the January 2025 Los Angeles Fires as my core example, I explore the microeconomics of how people prepare to cope with anticipated risks and how they adapt once these shocks are realized. I argue that free markets allow us to adapt to these challenges and that government policy often backfires and increases our risk exposure and hinders the pace of ex-post recovery.
Matthew E. Kahn
If Milton Friedman was elected the Mayor of Boston or Chicago, how would we govern the City? Why would the City thrive under his pro-competition rules of the game? Why hasn't he already been elected mayor? This book focuses on how to use pro-market ideas to reduce urban poverty and the political economy of why the people of Brooklyn wouldn't vote for Friedman.
Matthew E. Kahn
At first glance, these three risks appear unrelated. In this book, I argue that they are closely related and one's exposure and losses from these risks are all tied to the skills and mindset one develops over the course of one's life and the incentives and market forces that operate in the economy where people live.
Matthew E. Kahn
Optimists routinely produce macro charts documenting the correlation that environmental progress is positively correlated with economic growth. This book explores the microeconomics of how this correlation emerges. I provide a sober look at the interplay between market forces and government regulation in cost effectively improving environmental quality in a growing economy.
You can purchase my 11 books from Amazon
3. Climatopolis published in September 2010 by Basic Books. Here is the Book's overview.
Watch my UCSB Climatopolis Talk here.
The Economist Magazine reviewed this book in its September 3rd 2010 issue . This book explores the urban economics of adapting to climate change.
4. Here is my Book titled Fundamentals of Environmental and Urban Economics. When I teach undergraduate environmental economics, I use this as my textbook. For those who do not own a Kindle Reader, you can use this free app to read the book on your PC. You can download this e-book (the May 10th 2026 version) for free at this link. Here are my power point slides for the course. Here are a set of questions that can be used for exams or as homework.
5. Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China (joint with Siqi Zheng) , Princeton University Press May 2016.
6. From December 2016, An Introduction to Empirical Microeconomics. Here is a free copy for downloading.
![An Introduction to Empirical Microeconomics by [Kahn, Matthew E.]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/sitesv/AA5AbUAZC7bb2vkfNrgGT3qIi_khdYrMJLBhkTO5hCDD1k_rHvI9RU4DgIU3eM9kCPX01--7j6_l5Uvh5njnnlhtBVbOJzNwHddS2F8O8PnfXv6dZ-bxJN-lnHfFKOWG_COm9y8wjP3jgqPtKs8wP9mGsNV77buQwMbKos1AnktoM-T4j7nOyPt3oEprZU-IAjvz5IbPKkzxAPO_=w1280)
7. My Book on Price Theory Problems
This Amazon Book consists of many new applied micro questions to help young economists practice using some distinctive problems. For those who do not want to pay 99 cents for the Amazon version, you can download a free copy here.
8. My 2021 Book published by Yale University Press. Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of its Top Ten books in Business and Economics for Spring 2021 . To read the reviews click here. You can read a preview of the book here.
9. In 2021, Johns Hopkins Press published my new book. Read Chapter One. Click here to read the reviews and to order the book.
10. Going Remote. Published in Spring 2022. Here is Chapter One.
11. Introduction to Urban Economics. A free copy of the book (the 8/01/2024 version) can be downloaded here.
An Introduction to Urban Economics © 2024 by Matthew E. Kahn is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
For those with ample free time, you can watch this 3 second video of my son dunking a basketball.
Book #12!!
In March 2025, I released a new book titled; An Introduction to Natural Disaster Economics. (by Matthew E. Kahn)
In March 2025, I released a new book titled; An Introduction to Natural Disaster Economics. (by Matthew E. Kahn)
You can download a free copy of the .pdf here.
13. I am circulating my new book Free to Choose in the American City (published July2025). This book embraces a libertarian perspective on reducing urban poverty and improving urban quality of life. You can download a free copy.
14. IMy new book Economic Growth and Environmental Progress.
15. In September 2025, I created an e-book of all of my greeneconomics.blogspot.com entries that you can download here as a .pdf file.
16. My new book; Diabetes, Floods and Unemployment that you can download here.
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