Matthew E. Kahn is a Provost Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California.  He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at IZA.  He is a Senior Fellow at the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at USC.   He is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.   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 eleven books.   He is the author of  Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment (Brookings Institution Press 2006) and the co-author (joint with Dora L. Costa) of Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War (Princeton University Press 2009).  He is also the author of Climatopolis  (Basic Books 2010) and  Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China (joint with Siqi Zheng published by Princeton Press in 2016).  In March  2021, Yale University Press published his book titled Adapting to Climate Change.   In January 2021, Johns Hopkins Press published his book Unlocking the Potential of Post Industrial Cities (joint with Mac McComas).  In April 2022, the University of California Press published his book:  Going Remote.  His research focuses on urban and  environmental economics.   In 2025, he released several free e-books that are available below.  One is titled; An Introduction to Natural Disaster Economics and the other is titled;  Free to Choose in the American City.  He is married to Dora L. Costa.   

 Curriculum Vita (as of July 2025)  contains web links to almost all of my publications.   

My Google Scholar Page and my REPEC Economics Rankings Page,   

Email:   kahnme@usc.edu  

Twitter at @mattkahn1966    

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Popular Media Coverage   (out of date)   ,  Here are some of my recent podcasts discussing urban and environmental issues.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 as of March 2026

Bounding the Economic Loss from Diabetes with Imperfect Instruments

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.   

Will AI Improve Undergraduate Economics Education?

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. 

My review of the book "Fixed" by John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai.  You can download a free copy of it here.      My review is titled;  Who Protects the Sheep from the Wolves of Wall Street?   A Review of “Fixed” by Campbell and Ramadorai  (2025).   I sharply disagree with the authors' main premise.  They dismiss the human capital hypothesis.  My review focuses on life-cycle skill formation in problem solving.  

I have also written four new books that you can download for free.

An Introduction to Natural Disaster Economics

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.

Free to Choose in the American City

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.

Diabetes, Floods and Unemployment

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.   

Economic Growth and Environmental Progress

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 June 22nd 2023 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.

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. 

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.

13. In July 2025,  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.  In October 2025, I released my 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.  In November 2025, I released my first edition of my new book;  Diabetes, Floods and Unemployment that you can download here.