Microeconomic and Macroeconomic

Okey let’s start our lesson economy is divided into 2 different approach in the macroeconomic & microekonomi.two approach based on modern economic theory.
Adam Smith is usually considered the founder of the field micro economics,The branch of economics wich today is concerned with the behavior of individual entities such as markets,firms,and household.In the Wealth of nations(1776),Smith considered how individualprice are set,studied the determination of price of land,labour,and capital,and inquired into the strength and weaknesses o0f the market mechanism.Most important,He identified the remarkable efficiency properties of markets and saw that economic benefit comes from the self.Interested actions of individuals ,These remain important issues today,And while the study of micro economics has surely advanced greatly since Since Smith day, he is still cited by politicians and Economics alike.
The other major branch of economic subject is Macro economics,Wich is concerned with the overall performance of the economy.Macro economy didn’t even exist in it’s modern form until 1936,when Keynes publish his general theory of employment interest and in general theory of employment interest and money.At the time ,England and United States were still stuck in the great depression of the 1930s.With over one-quarter of the American labor force unemployed .In his new theory Keynes developed an analysis of what causes business cycles,with alternating spells of high unemployment and high inflation.Today macroeconomics examines a wide variety of areas,such as how total investment and consumption are determined,how central bank manage money and interest rates,What causes international financial crisis,And why some nations grow rapidly while other stagnanate.Although macroeconomics has progressed far since his first in sights,The issues addressed by Keynes still define the study of macroeconomics today.
The two braches-microeconomics and macroeconomics converge to form the core of modern economics.

Finally...

Someone explains in a mainstream newspaper that the compensation under the Australian government's proposed ETS/CPRS is highly distorting. Actually, now that the Liberals aren't going to vote for an ETS in any form why not start over and compensate simply by reducing corporation and personal income taxes across the board (which is the most efficient approach)? I guess that goes against the

Nice Antidote to All the China Bashing

Copenhagen is a bit like the blind men and the elephant. Everyone sees something different. Bernarditas de Castro Muller (on the left in the photo) writing in the Guardian blames the West and the US in particular. I blame the US too. Though of course it is the Bush administration and the Republicans in the US Congress that are more to blame than the Obama administration. I see that China and the

News Media as a Channel of Environmental Information Disclosure: Evidence from an EGARCH Approach

I am a coauthor of a new working paper that uses an event study methodology to look at the impact of bad environmental news on the stock returns of U.S. listed firms. The lead author, Ran Zhang, is one of my former students at RPI. The paper is based on a chapter of her dissertation. My role in the paper was suggesting the original topic to Ran, providing feedback at various stages, and doing a

Tuvalu is Rather New

Link to an article on the evolution of Pacific atolls. While I realised that these islands in their present form only developed after the end of the last Ice Age, I didn't realize that the stable islets on atolls have only been habitable for a thousand or so years due to a fall in sea level of about 2 metres.

Alley's AGU Lecture

Excellent lecture from the recent AGU meeting on the geology of climate change.

Climate Proposals Scoreboard Website

The Climate Interactive website translates climate policy proposals into expected climate outcomes. The video above provides some general introduction.They also compute emissions trajectories based on proposals. The resulting warming, is warming by 2100 rather than equilibrium warming. I'm guessing that the mean climate sensitivity they are using is 3C for doubling CO2. This chart shows that all

Filibuster

Paul Krugman agrees with me that the US Senate is "dysfunctional". One reason that the Australian parliament is relatively effective is that there are strict limits on how long each member can speak. Therefore, filibusters are almost impossible.

economy-ism introducing

halo this is my first blog in wich there are several economic articles.I hope this blog can help you for studying an economic lesson.there is several topic wich I try to tell& discuss in this blog as microeconomic,macroeconomics and also capital market and portopholio here.I hope this blog can be useful for you for studying economy lesson.only that i want to write and see you soon on my articles of economy next.

Is One State, One Vote the Problem?

In my opinion (subject to being changed by evidence and argument), the two main obstacles to a more meaningful outcome at COP15 were the intransigence of the US Senate and the gridlock in the UN structure in Copenhagen. In the end, the final accord was not put to a vote of the plenary but simply "noted". The objections of many of the small countries to being dictated to by the large countries who

Should You Submit Papers to Open Access Journals?

Here is an article on how to choose a journal to submit to in the field of paleontology (yes, recently I like to read blogs about dinosaur and other vertebrate paleontology). I disagree with quite a few of the points in the article. In particular, the blogger favors open access journals but then admits that anyone can pretty much get a copy of an article in the form of a pdf if they want one

Copenhagen

I don't have much to say about the Copenhagen conference at this point. Seems silly to try to analyse it from this distance. It looks to me like anything can happen at this point. What's puzzling me mostly is what the hell have the negotiators been doing for the last 2 years since Bali? They should have been more agreed on the basic framework for this meeting before getting there than it looks

Paul Samuelson

The big news today in economics is the death of Paul Samuelson. I don't have much to add to what is being said except that I am one of those first introduced to the topic via his textbook. We used it as the English textbook in the "Introductory Economics" course I took in my first year at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1985-6. There was also a very terse textbook in Hebrew titled "Mavo

Hanukkah

The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus: Gerrit van Honthorst, 1590-1656David Brooks write a short summary of the Hannukah story in the New York Times. Mostly he just recounts stuff that is in the books of Maccabees I and II (which are not part of the canonical Hebrew Bible but they were included as part of the first Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint). This stuff is partly

Copenhagen Circus?

Paul Frijter's take on the climate negotiations and my comment on his post:"Your blogpost shows why the new approach of the Australian Liberal Party won’t work. Taking some actions like increasing energy efficiency initiatives or renewable energy targets likely will only slow the growth of emissions in the face of the kind of things you list in the article. So we do need to save ourselves from

Two Paper Submissions this Week

We submitted two papers this week - more details when the working paper versions are up on the web. One is a resubmission (to a different journal) of my paper on between estimates of the EKC. The other is a new paper coauthored with a former student at Rensselaer, Ran Zhang, and Ken Simons an Assistant Prof. at RPI. It's a paper about corporate social responsibility based on a chapter from her

Peer Review, Berlin, 1945

The latest in the Downfall video clip meme:Like many commenters on YouTube write the captions really capture the feelings many of us have (at least now and then) when getting back peer reviews of our papers.

Copenhagen Prediction Market

CEEM at UNSW has set up a prediction market for the outcomes of COP15. It looks pretty complicated - i.e. you'd need to know a lot of details or read up on them on the site to know even what many of these markets mean. And the prizes are in the form of carbon offsets. Will be interesting to see how well it works. The current most probable outcome for the the developed nations target is a

EERH Working Paper Statistics for November 2009

The rate of abstract views and downloads for the EERH Working Papers on RePEc seems to be settling down this month. We got 180 paper downloads and 507 abstract views. The most popular paper this month in terms of downloads was the paper by Peter Wood and Frank Jotzo: "Price Floors for Emissions Trading". A paper by Evers et al.: "Economics of Ethanol Production – a brief introduction" got the

One Reason I Don't Belong to a Union

It's one thing to be forced to pay taxes to a government that does things you disagree with, but why pay fees to a union who waste some of them on political campaigns that you disagree with and are irrelevant to their members' direct interests? Of course, there are other reasons too... BTW I once did join a union as it was the best route to health insurance in the country I then lived in and I

Spash Scandal One Month On

As you may have heard, Clive Spash resigned from CSIRO and is moving back to Europe, apparently to Norway (I'm not surprised really about this)... I haven't spoken with him since the Darwin meeting. In the meantime, the issue has been debated in the Australian Senate and CSIRO have been trying to clarify their policy (see below). Dr Clark's position looks reasonable. I guess the problem is how

China Can't Win

People like this see China's announced carbon intensity target as "unambitious" because the business as usual scenarios from the IEA and US EIA already incorporate all of China's ambitious energy intensity and renewable energy goals. I wouldn't call those scenarios "BAU". Yes, China's carbon intensity target is probably mostly confirming their existing greenhouse policy. But why should China have

Great Climate Data Resources Page

In response to the "Climategate" events the RealClimate blog has put together a great resource page with links to various climate data and modelling results.

Artificial Meat

I'm very skeptical that this would be an economic proposition any time soon. You'd think it would be a lot easier to produce artificial milk - engineer some micro-organisms to secrete cow milk. Instead we still go to the trouble of raising cows, milking them, and transporting the perishable product to market. I'd like this to be true - it has big environmental and possibly ethical advantages.

China's Intensity Target is at Least as Stringent as the US Intensity Target

I'm puzzled by people saying that the Chinese intensity target is just business as usual. Of course, Roger Pielke is skeptical like me that the IEA projection is anything like realistic BAU. Some simple math reveals that the Chinese target is likely a greater intensity cut than that proposed by the US. The US proposes to cut emissions by 17%. In other words emissions will be 83% of the 2005 level

China Announces Carbon Intensity Target

China proposes to reduce carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020 relative to 2005 which was a year with a relatively high carbon intensity.President Hu Jintao announced at the UN Meeting in New York that China would adopt a carbon intensity target. Now we know what it is. This looks like a quite ambitious target. Frank Jotzo and I are supposed to talk about this at the AARES meeting in February. Now

ANU Economics Showcase Slides

I'm presenting on Thursday in the ANU Economics Showcase. I'll be speaking in the 1:30-3:00pm slot. You can find a draft of my slides here and my abstract over there.

And then a Reject...

Right after getting a revise and resubmit I get a "reject" for my paper "Between Estimates of the Environmental Kuznets Curve". Understandably, referees and editors are unwilling to publish more papers on the EKC and this paper apparently confused people as to whether it was a comment on Vollebergh et al. or a new econometric method for estimating EKCs (it's both) and if it was the latter I

Revise and Resubmit...

I got another revise and resubmit today. This time for my paper on interfuel elasticities of substitution. The most important point the referees want me to address is the weights I use in the meta-regression. I use the square root of sample size. They would like me to use the standard errors of the parameters from the original studies. However, one referee admits that when the statistics that are

Does the Natural Resource Curse not Apply in Democracies?

One of my colleagues, Sambit Bhattacharya, has an article out on natural resources and corruption. Their conclusion is:"Resource-rich countries are often cursed by corruption and governance problems. This column shows that the natural resource curse burdens non-democracies, but countries with better democratic institutions are not corrupted by such endowments. For governments accountable to their

Fenner Presentation Slides

Here are the slides for my presentation at the Fenner School today. Because of the way I set things up to allow me to have an "animation" in a pdf file there aren't actually as many slides as there are pages in this document. But I didn't delete the extra pages because this is my emergency copy if my flash drive fails!

Nigel Jollands

Nigel Jollands, the head of the energy efficiency unit at the International Energy Agency gave a presentation today at the Crawford School. He talked about three main ideas the first of which was the relationship between changes in energy use, changes in well-being, changes in energy efficiency. This diagram is a revised version of his:The y-axis is the percentage change in well-being, the x-axis

My Fenner School Seminar: Thursday 12th November

As I mentioned a couple of months ago I'm giving a seminar at the Fenner School of the Environment and Society at ANU tomorrow, Thursday, at 1:00pm in the Forestry Lecture Theatre. As usual the slides will go up on the web as soon as I've completed them... I'm still working on model runs to put in the presentation as I wasn't pleased with the results I presented in Darwin. I'll show those results

Review of Prosperity without Growth

Here is a draft of my review to be published in Ecological Economics of Prosperity without Growth:Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite PlanetBy Tim Jackson, Earthscan, London, 2009.Reviewed by David I. SternUsually, I find myself disagreeing with advocates of zero economic growth (defined as non-increasing GDP). First, a large part of the world’s population remains poor by any

EERH Working Paper Statistics for October 2009

We saw an increase in both abstract views and downloads this month over last month. This is the first full month of participation in RePEc - data started being collected midway through September. Only a few papers were included in NEP reports this month (which tends to increase downloads). So these numbers might be representative of the expected performance of the series. We ranked 276th out of

Rudd's Speech to the Lowy Institute

In his speech to the Lowy Institute on Friday the Prime Minister lashed out at climate change skeptics but lumped them together with those who agree on the natural science but disagree on the policy response to climate change:"The opponents of action on climate change fall into one of three categories.· First, the climate science deniers.· Second, those that pay lip service to the

Still More on Spash Case

This from the ABC includes more quotes from Clive.

The Australian Weighs in on the Spash Scandal with an Editorial

Here it is.

AARES 2010 Abstract

I just submitted an abstract for the AARES 2010 meeting in Adelaide. You have till Friday to submit... I also expect to be presenting at the Environmental Economics Research Hub Workshop that precedes it. Here is the abstract:How Feasible are Developing Country Energy and Carbon Intensity Targets? An Econometric AnalysisFrank Jotzo, Resource Management in the Asia Pacific, Crawford School of

CSIRO Doesn't Seem to Understand What Social Science is All About

ABC reporting on the Spash controversy. If the comments here accurately represent CSIRO's position then they don't have much of a grasp about what applied social science and certainly economics is all about. Some more information from Clive was also published in the Australian.

CSIRO Tries to Ban Paper Critical of Emissions Trading

Just got back last night from the ANZSEE conference in Darwin (yeah we went to Kakadu too) where I saw Clive Spash present the paper in question that CSIRO have tried to ban from publication. From the presentation the paper is just a long list of different criticisms of emission trading schemes, none of which were new to me and not all of which I really agreed with. Most cogent is the issue of

ANU Economics Showcase

Here is my presentation for the ANU Economics Showcase - a two day event that presents the range of ANU research to potential students, members of the public service, other ANU economists, and the general public (i.e. anyone who wants to come along :)). The showcase is on 25th and 26th of November. I'm scheduled for 26th November in the session from 1:30-3:00pm.Signals or Noise? What Does

ANZSEE Presentation Slides

Here are the slides for my presentation at ANZSEE in Darwin on Wednesday. I only have 20 minutes to talk including questions so I'm going to have to cut something here. But thought I might as well put everything up for now. I'll be giving a longer version at the Fenner School at ANU on 12th November. Also coming up this month is a presentation at the ANU Economics Showcase 2009. I will be talking

Energy Intensity Again

There is a stronger relationship between energy intensity of GDP and GDP per capita when you plot both of them using ordinary exchange rates http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2009/09/energy-intensity.html">rather than purchasing power parity adjusted exchange rates:I think that the relationship is mainly due to the tendency for currencies to overvalued relative to purchasing power parity in

Levitt Hits Back

Steven Levitt hits back at his critics in this new post in the NY Times. The post is a bit revisionist I think as to what exactly is in the chapter in Superfreakonomics. The tone of that chapter is clearly that carbon taxes or cap and trade won't work (for unclear reasons) and, therefore, we need geoengineering. This post places geoengineering as a method for quickly cooling the Earth (which I

World Values Map

I was visiting the World Values Survey website in the process of collecting more data for my EERH project.Thought I'd post this fascinating "map" from their homepage:Not surprisingly, the English speaking countries (sorry Quebecois) are found grouped together. I found this was also the case for levels of sulfur abatement technology. Similarly the Germanic or Protestant countries occupy a common

Quality of Economics Research Funded by the ARC

The ARC has carried out an evaluation of the citation impact of the publications derived from ARC funded research. The main finding (full report on ARC website) is that ARC funded publications receive more citations than other Australian publications and other global publications. That is good, but it is hard to have an intuitive sense I think of what the Australian or global averages are. So I

Pedigree Bias in Economics

At least anecdotally I think it is true that economics has a pedigree bias. Good departments tend to hire people from a limited subset of top schools. This is just as true in Australia as in the U.S. There are very few ANU economists who don't have a PhD from either a reasonably decent or even top U.S. school, a top British university (few if any less senior people) or ANU itself. The bias in

Climate Sensitivity and Expected Temperature Increase

My response to C S Norman questions' about yesterday's post was getting so long I decided to turn it into a blog post.The climate sensitivity is the expected temperature increase for the equivalent of a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the pre-industrial level of 280ppm to 560ppm. My understanding is that the confidence interval (the expected range about which we can be 90% or

The Climate Sensitivity is Probably Really High

I'm not surprised by the trend for recent research to come up with higher values of the climate sensitivity - the change in temperature in the long-term for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The piece I linked suggests that current levels of carbon dioxide are associated in the long-run with 25 to 50m higher sea levels, though we do need to be cautious in basing current predictions to

Freaking Out About Superfreakonomics

Around the blogosphere there seems to be quite a bit of freaking out about the about to be released book Superfreakonomics going on. Specifically, about Chapter 5 on climate change. Joshua Gans has a nice set of links to some of the comments and there is some response by Dubner here.I'm not too surprised by this. I was never that impressed with Freakonomics. Reading through this chapter one of

Ostrom 12th Most Cited Book in Ecological Economics

According to the paper I coauthored with Bob Costanza (and Chunbo Ma, Brendan Fisher, and Lining He). One of her papers published in the journal also ranked in the list of the most cited papers published in the journal but was only ranked 52nd. Of course, our data end before 2004.

Looking for Academic Economics Jobs in Australia

In the past not many foreign institutions advertised on the American Economic Association's jobs website JOE. But this seems to have changed and now most leading Australian universities are advertising there. Not all these positions appear to be advertised on UniJobs, which I think is the leading Australian academic job site. I've had a couple of recent discussions with people looking to do PhDs

Rich Howarth Seminar at ANU: 4th November

Speaker: Richard Howarth, Pat and John Rosenwald Professor, Dartmouth College, Editor-in-Chief, Ecological EconomicsTopic: Uncertainty, Ethics and the Economics of Climate ChangeAbstract: Climate change is a long-term, complex problem that involves fundamental uncertainties. As such, the evaluation of climate change policies depends critically on the links between time preference, risk aversion,

Paul Romer on Elinor Ostrom and Crucial Assumptions

Paul Romer makes some interesting comments on Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize win. He points out that many or most economic theories depend on what he calls "skyhooks" - what http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2009/08/crucial-assumptions.html">I called "crucial assumptions". According to Romer assuming that people follow rules is a typical "skyhook". Rather than assuming that people would follow

Ostrom and Williamson Win Nobel Prize

After much speculation:"The 2009 The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel goes to Elinor Ostrom "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons" and Oliver E. Williamson "for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm."Williamson was mentioned but Ostrom is a surprise. At 1:04 European Central Time someone had

A Statement of Your Most Significant Contributions to this Research Field

I have to write this for the grant applications I'm planning on filing early next year. Usually, in job applications you have to write about your current and planned research. But this is different and a bit weird. It feels a bit like I'm writing my own obituary :) For U.S. grants you just send them your (condensed) CV. Australia is much more into giving money to individuals than for specific

Omitted Variables Bias in Estimating the Rate of Global Warming

There has been a lot of discussion in the media and blogosphere of a supposed cooling of the global climate since 1998 that is being pounced upon by climate change sceptics. This supposed trend is almost certainly not a http://www.garnautreview.org.au/CA25734E0016A131/WebObj/Globaltemperaturetrends-BreuschandVahid(ANU)2008/$File/Global%20temperature%20trends%20-%20Breusch%20and%20Vahid%20(ANU)%

Nobel Prediction Market

Here is a prediction market for who will win the Nobel Prize in Economics. My original pick, Robert Barro, is marginally leading, and all the other suspects are on the list. I'd really like William Baumol to win it. My friend and colleague Astrid Kander wrote an interesting paper related to one of Baumol's ideas. Baumol gave her some good comments on it. Actually it was a chapter in her

IEA Lowers Projected Carbon Emissions

A New York Times article about an IEA report on future carbon emissions. They are lowering projections due to slower growth worldwide and Chinese efforts to reduce energy intensity. I've been thinking the same thing myself. I didn't buy into the Garnaut Review's idea that business as usual emissions would rise faster than the IPCC previously expected. Though the problem now is distinguishing

Who Will Win the Nobel Prize in Economics? Update

Back in August I discussed who might win the Nobel Prize in Economics to be awarded on Monday. My pick then was Robert Barro as the most cited and not so controversial economist who had not won it yet. Others are now weighing in. Here are my comments on these suggestions:Ernst Fehr Possible, though Kahnemann won the prize not that long ago.Matthew Rabin Too young.William Nordhaus Possible, though

Environmental Economics Research Hub Research Reports Monthly Report

As I previously blogged, the Environmental Economics Research Hub Research Reports are now included in RePEc. Each month RePEc calculate how many abstract reviews and downloads each paper, author, and series got. You can track the downloads for EERH http://logec.repec.org/scripts/seriesstat.pf?item=repec:een:eenhrr">here. We got 157 downloads in our first month. Some caveats:1. It's only a

Energy/Capital Ratio

There doesn't seem to be much of relation between energy intensity and GDP per capita. But this chart shows that there is a relationship between energy per dollar of (estimated) capital and GDP per capita:The points off to the top right are mostly oil producers. Apart from those points there seems to be a clear downward trend. High income countries use less energy per dollar of capital than poor

Fenner School Seminar: 12th November

I'm giving a seminar at the Fenner School on November 12th. It will be an expanded version of the presentation I'm giving at ANZSEE in Darwin. Here is the abstract:Modelling Global Trends in Energy EfficiencyThis seminar reports on ongoing research in the CERF Environmental Economics Research Hub funded project: “Modelling the Global Diffusion of Energy Efficiency and Low-Carbon Technology”. The

Drew Jones' TED Talk

Cool graphics (via Climate Progress) showing the relation between various emissions scenarios and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases: The results of my poll said that emissions would be the same in 2050 as today. You can see the results of continuing that until 2100 at around 9:20 in the video - 600ppm in 2100. Certainly better than supposed business as usual but still way too high.

Energy Use per Capita

Yesterday I showed you a chart of energy intensity vs. GDP per capita. There didn't seem to be much relationship in that data. Today we have energy use per capita and GDP per capita:Here there is a clear relationship. Unfortunately, for environmental Kuznets curve advocates it is pretty linear. Energy use is a first order proxy for environmental impact. For example, solar energy might be cleaner

Energy Intensity

Now I've put my database together we can have a first look at the data:Energy intensity is energy in terms of kilogrammes of oil equivalent per dollar of GDP using purchasing power parity adjusted exchange rates in 2005 prices. There are 3663 data points. There certainly doesn't seem to be any simple relationship between the level of income and energy intensity. On the other hand we can see some

UN vs. World Bank Data

I've finally put together the main database for my Environmental Economics Research Hub project on energy efficiency and carbon emissions. I have full data on energy use (by fuel), structure of the economy, GDP, investment, schooling, climate, emissions etc. for 99 countries for the period 1971 to 2007. For my 2002 paper on explaining sulfur emissions I only managed to put together data for 64

IEA Data at the National Library of Australia

International Energy Agency data is essential for serious global energy research but is very expensive. The full database costs E1400 ($A2,400) per year. If you only need a small amount of data you can purchase a "datacard" but it's still expensive. In my previous position at RPI I purchased data when necessary using research grants. But Paul Burke told me that the National Library of Australia

Gilles Saint‑Paul

Gives a somewhat more modest response to the British internal critics of mainstream economics than John Cochrane did to Paul Krugman. Maybe that's because he is a European? :)

Ranking Economists by Blog Popularity

The Eastern Economic Journal is publishing a paper about ranking economists by blog popularity. That's not something I want to catch on too fast! :) Reasonably popular blogs like Environmental Economics, Core Economics, and John Quiggin rank between 400,000 and 900,000 in Alexa rank. I have a long way to go.

Response to Paul Krugman

Via John Quiggin, a response to Paul Krugman.

ANU's 21 Future Fellows

ANU won 21 ARC Future Fellowships, second only to the University of Melbourne which won 25. ANU has now published http://news.anu.edu.au/?p=1629">the list of the future fellows and their research topics. I am surprised that all but one of them (Thomas Huber) is already a member of the academic staff of ANU. I would have expected to see more people who wanted to use the fellowship to come to work

EERH Research Reports Join RePEc

Everything is now complete and debugged and the Environmental Economics Research Hub Reports are now included in the RePEc database. The papers will be included in the IDEAS and EconPapers search engines and other RePEc services.This will provide much greater visibility for our working paper series in the worldwide economics community. RePEc has around 21,000 registered members and even more

Penn World Table vs. World Development Indicators

Today, we had a presentation from Prasada Rao of University of Queensland on the theory of constructing international comparisons of income. He also covered some more practical aspects concerning the recent new international price comparison benchmark - ICP 2005. As everyone knows, the prices of identical goods vary across countries as exemplified by the Big Mac Index. But actually constructing

The Garnaut Review One Year On

Ross Garnaut gave a presentation to a totally full theatre at Manning Clark Centre at ANU yesterday evening, reviewing his Review and the responses to it in the last year. From what he said he pretty much anticipated what would happen especially regarding the lobbying by business for free permit allocations (after all he's chairman of a mining company himself). Still he said that the government's

ARC Future Fellowships

The results were announced of the first round of the ARC (Australian Research Council) Future Fellowships. These are fellowships tenable for 4 years at an Australian institution for "mid-career" researchers. 200 fellowships were awarded out of 975 proposals submitted. ANU got 21 of the fellowships, though its success rate of 26% was not a lot higher than average. Universities such as Deakin and

Krugman in the NYT Magazine

In case you haven't seen it yet, here is Paul Krugman's article on the state of macroeconomics from the New York Times Magazine.

Progress on "Hub" Project

My research project funded by the Environmental Economics Research Hub is about the international diffusion of energy efficiency technology at the macro-economic level. The project has two main stages. In the first stage I estimate a function that explains energy intensity (=the amount of energy used in the economy/GDP) in terms of the level of inputs like capital, labor, and the various types of

British Wages in the Early Modern Period

An interesting article about the welfare gains from the introduction of commodities like coffee and sugar in early modern Britain. The authors also argue that these gains lead to underestimation of the increase in wages in early modern Britain. I think they are right about the rising wages in Britain but a bit surprised that they think that that finding is new as Robert Allen makes the high wages

Archives Awaiting Activation

Hopefully, we'll be off this list very soon :) Just been ironing out some Mac/Unix file format glitches.

EERH Research Reports Joining RePEc

As you may know, my position is funded by the http://www.crawford.anu.edu.au/research_units/eerh/">Environmental Economics Research Hub based at the Crawford School at ANU. We have a http://www.crawford.anu.edu.au/research_units/eerh/Publications">working paper series reporting on research carried out in the Hub. We've now completed http://www.crawford.anu.edu.au/RePEc/EEN/">indexing the series

Revise and Resubmit

I got a "revise and resubmit" for the paper I submitted to Journal of Productivity Analysis. There are of course no guarantees in these situations that you will be published and "major revisions" have been requested but that is still good news.

Allen: The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective

Robert C. Allen tries to explain why the Industrial Revolution took place in Britain in his new book The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective.Allen (2009) places energy innovation centre-stage in his theory. Like Tony Wrigley, he compares Britain to the Netherlands and Belgium. These were the most developed economies in the world in the early modern age with much higher wages than

Comments on Scientific Papers

Once upon a time, many comments were published on scientific papers, including in economics. Nowadays, relatively few are. Rick Trebino has written an article that suggests some of the reasons why not. The article is rather amusing/cathartic for anyone who has been frustrated with the academic publication process. In economics, comments have been replaced by increasingly lengthy refereeing

Time Allocation to Reading Journal Articles

A recent article in Science discusses the future of scientific publication and scholarship strategies. The chart above showing trends to less time spent reading more papers also shows that scientists spend about 5% of their time on reading articles.

Estimating a Two-Equation Model of the Swedish Economy

My coauthor sent me some Swedish capital stock estimates for 1850-2000 which allows me to estimate the production function equation that explains economic output in terms of labor, capital and energy in addition to the energy cost ratio equation I estimated on its own before. Having two equations which share many of the same parameters makes estimating those parameters accurately a lot easier. I

Collapse

I have been reading Collapse, Jared Diamond's account of the collapses of several past civilizations - Easter Island, the Maya, the Anasazi, and the Greenland Norse settlement prominent among them - and discussions of environmental stresses and sustainability issues in modern societies. Included is some original research of his with a coauthor on the factors affecting success or failure in the

Presentation at ANZSEE Conference

My abstract was approved for the ANZSEE Conference in Darwin. If there are no hitches with the funding I hope to go and present. I've never been to the Northern Territory (or anywhere west of Melbourne in Australia for that matter) so that should be interesting.

U.S. Electric Supply and Grid

Some great maps of U.S. electricity supply and grid from NPR's website. The map above shows all power stations by size. Other maps show the share of different power sources by state (e.g. Vermont is the most nuclear state in the Union). Most importantly the transmission lines are mostly not where the best locations for alternative energy are (with the exception of some areas of the southwest near

The Declining Relative Value of Energy

One of the little known facts of energy economics is that in the long-run data that we have available the value of energy relative to the value of output has fallen over time. The chart shows the data for Sweden. Output here is gross output. Relative to GDP the ratio was 1:1 or above in the early 19th century. That fact seems to rule out structural change as an explanation of the trend.

Energy Quality

Today I submitted another paper, this time on "energy quality" to Ecological Economics. The paper has been several years in the making. I've kept coming back and changing things, sometimes radically, until I finally came up with something that I thought was submittable. I also simultaneously submitted it to the Munich Personal RePEc Archive. Energy quality is the idea that different fuels have

Um?

What's the point of using carbon dioxide emissions to grow algae when we can just use the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to grow plants? Maybe the plants can be grown with fewer other inputs if the carbon dioxide is concentrated? But if the algae are used as products then no carbon is sequestered. So what is this guy "frustrated" about? I guess there may be reductions in other fossil fuel

Crucial Assumptions

"All theory depends on assumptions which are not quite true. That is what makes it theory. The art of successful theorizing is to make the inevitable simplifying assumptions in such a way that the final results are not very sensitive. A "crucial" assumption is one on which the conclusions do depend sensitively, and it is important that crucial assumptions be reasonably realistic. When the results

Europe Research Links

Today I attended a workshop on research collaboration between Australia and Europe. My impression was that in the areas I work in it's probably pretty hard to get funded by the European Union. Ironically, it seemed that if you have specific expertise about Australia you are more likely to be able to join a funded project. 2/3 of EU funding goes to FP-7 (Framework Program 7) "Cooperation" projects

Predicting Nobel Prize-Winners in Economics

I've been reading bits of "Lives of the Laureates" on and off recently. The book is based on a lecture series at Trinity University where Nobel laureates in economics are asked to describe their evolution as economists. Many of their lives do seem to have been "stochastic trends" :) Some like Clive Granger weren't even sure that they were ever economists. John Harsanyi left ANU because some

Declining Abstract Views and Downloads Per Person (and per Paper) at RePEc

The chart shows monthly abstract views and paper downloads per registered member at RePEc. I can't go back any further as I only started collecting the necessary data in October 2004 and RePEc doesn't seem to publish a time series on the number of members. The number of abstract views and downloads per item has also declined. Hypotheses that could explain this trend:1. There is less interest over

Results of Emissions Poll

My poll on what global greenhouse gas emissions would be in 2050 is over and here are the results:The final distribution is still somewhat bimodal. The only person who chose "no change" was me. I presume that there will be increased action to address climate change in the next 40 years, but going by the precedent of the Kyoto Treaty it won't be as effective as its proponents hope. Still as most

Community of Science

I just discovered the Community of Science database. The main purpose for joining it is in order to get funding opportunity alerts. So far I have found it to be more useful for Australia based researchers than SPIN/SMARTS. But you also get to post a profile as in the link above. I don't know how useful that is - whether people use this to search for expertise. Anyway it doesn't take much extra

Journal of Economic Surveys

After a lightning fast review and rejection (one very useful referee report and one unuseful referee report) of my paper on meta-analysis of interfuel substitution at Energy Economics I'm resubmitting it to the Journal of Economic Surveys. One of the editors is a coauthor of two of the (better) studies in my meta-analysis and I noticed that Tom Stanley is on the editorial board. I've revised the

Rank Inflation?

While looking for something else, I came across a report from DEEWR (Commonwealth Department of Education) on trends in employment in the higher education sector in Australia. Since 1999 there has been a nice increase in the number of academic staff (faculty) at Australian universities after a lengthy period of stagnation:Currently 33% of staff are at level B (lecturer = assistant professor in

Pacific Decadal Oscillation

I just saw an interesting article about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the El Nino-La Nina cycle. If my understanding is correct the PDO is much like a longer wavelength version of El Nino/La Nina. The shorter El Nino waves are superimposed on the longer PDO waves:This could be good news for our water situation here in Australia. Though the PDO has been in the cold phase for a few years now

An Even Sterner Review

A nice paper by Sterner and Persson points out that analyses like the Stern Review do not take into account the possibility that the prices of environmental goods will rise relative to those of anthropogenic goods and services as they become scarcer. They replace the standard utility function in Nordhaus' DICE model (which assumes infinite substitutability in consumption between environmental and

Economics: The Open Access, Open Assessment E-Journal

I'm probably late to the party here but have just been looking at the website of Economics: The Open Access, Open Assessment E-Journal. It is an effort to increase access and speed up the refereeing process, which is notoriously slow in economics. The journal has attracted a strong advisory and editorial board and is getting a good share of citations as measured by RePEc.

Only Six Days Left To Go

To vote in my climate change poll! The question is: "How much higher or lower than today do you expect global greenhouse gas emissions to be in 2050?" Note the "global" and that I want to know about "emissions" not "concentrations in the atmosphere". So far 25 people have voted and the distribution is bimodal - people seem to expect change in one direction or the other. Next week, I'll provide a

Bad Use of Citations

A paper in the British Medical Journal by Steven Greenberg examines the use of citations around a meme in the medical literature. The meme was that beta-amyloid protein "is produced by and injures skeletal muscle of patients with inclusion body myositis". Apparently this is false, but a huge number of papers state that it is true. From the abstract:"Design A complete citation network was

Climate Change Institute Open Day

Today, I attended the ANU's Climate Change Institute Open Day. There was a mix of natural and social science presentations ending with a 1 1/2 hour panel discussion featuring Tony McMichael, Warwick McKibbin, Kylie Catchpole, Andrew McIntosh, Brendan Mackey, and Ian Fry. I've found that seminars related to climate change often attract questions from climate change activists or deniers which

Why Most Published Research Results are False

A dramatic title to a paper published by John Ioannidis in PLOS Medicine. The arguments seem to be really a variant on the publication bias argument familiar in the economics meta-analysis literature. Imagine a field of study where there are no true relationships among the variables. For example, imagine that no drugs actually have an effect on a particular disease. Different researchers test the

Book Review: The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth

I have been reading The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth by Barry Naughton. It seems to be a nicely balanced objective survey of the Chinese economy covering both its evolution, especially since the key dates of 1949 (founding of the PRC) and 1978 (beginning of liberalization). As the author writes, most commentators seem to either over- or under- estimate China. And as other commenters on

ANZSEE Conference: Darwin, October 2009

I just submitted my abstract to the ANZSEE Conference in Darwin. Rich Howarth and Bob Costanza are supposed to be attending. The last ANZSEE conference I went to was at Griffith University in 1999. I was ANZSEE treasurer then. I've never been to the Northern Territory so that should be interesting too. And I'm hoping my wife will be able to present at the conference too.

What is Your Erdös Number?

Paul Erdös was a Hungarian Jewish mathematician who published a very large number of papers with a total of 511 collaborators. Those collaborators are assigned an Erdös number of one. Those who collaborated with them but not with Erdös have an Erdös number of two and so forth. Economics Nobel Prize winner Eric Maskin has an Erdös number of two and as a result Partha Dasgupta and Kenneth Arrow

Between Estimates of the Environmental Kuznets Curve

I submitted this paper to JEEM today. It follows up on a paper published earlier this year in the journal by Vollebergh et al. They argued that existing estimates of the environmental Kuznets curve are contingent on the treatment of the "time effects". Traditional panel data regression estimators assume that there is a different intercept for each country and often that there is a intercept for

Citations to Book Chapters

There are very few. At least that's what I've found so far in my career. Only around 1.5% of the citations I've received are to the book chapters I've published, though I've published something like 14 of them (including chapters in encyclopedias like the Encyclopedia of Energy) which is more than a third of the number of journal articles I've published. About 11% of my citations are to working

China and Japan Dominate Alternative Energy Innovation

This chart from a Thomson-Reuters report on patenting activity in alternative energy compares 1997-1999 with 2006-2008. EP is patents submitted to the European Patent Office. The most obvious trends are the amazing growth in Chinese activity (and to a lesser extent American, Korean, and British interest) and a swing towards wind energy innovation. The report also splits patenting among origins in

China Update 2009

Today I attended the 2009 China Update at ANU. It's a day of presentations by researchers from Australia, China, and the US on the latest economic situation in China. We received a book edited by Ross Garnaut, Ligang Song, and Wing Thye Woo containing most of the papers presented. However, the best two presentations of the day, in my opinion - the first and last presentations of the day, aren't

Presentation: Monday 13th July

I'm giving a presentation at the School of Economics, University of Queensland, tomorrow - Monday 13th July at 11:00am, Room 114 Colin Clark Building. The slides are here.

Vaclav Smil

I'm having a look at a recent book by Vaclav Smil: Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years . I'm very surprised to find that there is no Wikipedia article on Smil. I'm also a bit shocked by his criticism of other authors. On Jared Diamond's Collapse, he writes: "a derivative, unpersuasive, and simplistically deterministic book". Almost at in the same class as Taleb. The book is a

Presentation Slides

As promised, here are the slides for my presentation on Monday from the image above. It's not as long as it seems because several of the slides are duplicated to allow me to put bullet points one after the other onto the screen. But it still seems too long for my time (40 minutes + questions) so I may yet make some changes.

Economics Search Engine

Maybe a bit anti-interdisciplinary, but here is an economics search engine.Posting this reminded me of koogle - the ultraorthodox Jewish search portal (whose English search engine doesn't seem to work). But it certainly could be useful if you don't want to read about the NBA Commissioner :)

Job Talk Abstract

Here is the abstract for my upcoming presentation:Modelling Global Trends in Emissions and Energy EfficiencyAbstractThe environmental Kuznets curve has been a popular simple model of the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality. It is plagued, however, by significant econometric issues and explains relatively little about the differences in emissions between countries. In

Roger Pielke Jr.

I'd never heard of either Roger Pielke Sr or Roger Pielke Jr until I read very critical commentary on both of them on the Climate Progress blog. I've looked through a lot of Pielke Junior's blogposts, his paper in nature with Wigley, and slides from a recent presentation he gave. Most of what I read seemed entirely non-controversial from my perspective. In no way is the guy a "climate denier".

Another Climate Policy Poll

John Whitehead ran a survey on RESECON asking:"Considering two economic incentive-based environmental policies that couldbe used address climate change, which do you prefer?"Not so surprisingly, unlike the general public, the majority of respondents preferred a carbon tax:Dale Jorgenson also prefers a carbon tax:.

Designing a Job Talk

I just heard this afternoon that I have a job interview on Monday. The deadline was just last Friday! I've never seen an academic job search move this fast. Anyway, I now need to prepare a presentation for Monday. I'm somewhat dissatisified with the last two presentations I did as bases for this one. This post will be something of a stream of consciousness thing...One I did in March was on

Sensitivity Analysis of Climate Policy

Dale Jorgenson et al. did do a sensitivity analysis of their climate policy CGE model in 2000. They found that imposing zero substitutability between inputs had a big impact on the estimated costs of emissions reduction policies compared to their base case model. The impact depended on what they assumed the government did with the revenue from a carbon tax.When they assumed that the revenue from

What Do the Mitigation Policy Models Assume about Interfuel Substitution? And is it Important?

In my previous blogpost I commented that the elasticity of substitutions between fuels and between energy and capital were likely to be very important in estimates of the costs of emissions reduction policies. I've been trying to find support for, or evidence against, this hypothesis.Bhattacharya (1996) writes: "It is generally agreed that the elasticity values are the single most important

Interfuel Substitution and the Costs of Climate Change Policy

A meta-analysis is an analysis of existing empirical studies rather than another original primary study. The aim of a meta-analysis is to find out what is the average size of some parameter or effect in the existing literature - for example the average estimated damage from climate change or the elasticity of demand for gasoline - and what are the factors that cause there to be differences

Wordle

Wordle is a fun website which allows you to convert text into "word clouds". I used Wordle to create this graphic by pasting my entire PhD dissertation into the applet :)

The Public Prefers More Economic Pain

Of course they don't see it this way. A large majority of the US public support regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Fewer support a cap and trade scheme and I'm sure even less support a carbon tax. A carbon tax with few exceptions and recycling of revenue by cutting existing distorting taxes is under the uncertainty of the real world the most economically efficient way to reduce carbon

Climate Change Lunch

We met today for the monthly "Climate Change Lunch" that we hold at ANU - if you are in Canberra and interested in meeting to discuss climate change policy and economics please contact Jack Pezzey. Among the topics we discussed was my poll. In particular, we wondered why the distribution is bimodal. There are positive responses and negative responses, but no-one chose the class "0-25%". The one

Does the Grant System Discourage Innovation?

Many of those interviewed for this New York Times article think so. I believe the same applies in many or most scientific fields. The majority of the comments also support that view. Even the supporters of the current U.S. process seem to be agreeing with Winston Churchill's comments on democracy. An alternative often mentioned in the comments is to support strong individuals rather than strong

Delays for Clean Coal

Interesting article by Gregg Easterbrook on delays in implementing more energy and carbon efficient approaches to electricity generation from coal. It sounds like perverse regulation is getting in the way of what the market is willing to do...

Energy Spiral

Cool energy spiral chart compares different energy quantities.

How Optimistic Are You about Reductions in Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

I've added a poll at the upper righthand side of the blog asking: "What Will Be the Global Level of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 2050 Compared to Today?" I'm interested in total world emissions (not per capita) and this is emissions not concentrations. Please go ahead and vote!

eigenfactor.org

Eigenfactor.com is a relatively new website that provides ratings for academic journals. It's main competitor is the venerable Journal Citation Reports from ISI and in the field of economics impact factors computed by RePEc from the information in their database. Eigenfactor actually derives its data from ISI. It uses the record of citations in a given year to articles published in the previous

New Global Ranking of Economics Research Institutions

RePEc has developed a new global ranking of economics research institutions. The new ranking agglomerates economists at different departments within an institution. Previous RePEc rankings of institutions have treated each department as a separate entity. Universities like Australian National University have suffered because they have four main economics departments (!) as well as a few

Conspicuous Blogging

An interesting article about changes in the ways people are signalling status - a switch from conspicuous consumption of material goods to online signalling through the number of Facebook friends say. I'm not sure quite how important this is as a trend in quantitative terms but there is certainly something in it. It fits in with similar news from Japan. Of course those of us in academia have long

Another Review of Taleb

I wrote a very short review of "The Black Swan" a little while ago. Here is a good but very long review of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. A summary would be: "Taleb is unoriginal when right, otherwise wrong (especially about option pricing), and a dilettante/crank".

Most Expensive U.S. Suburbs by State

Business Week has a list of the most expensive U.S. suburbs in each state. What's stunning from an Australian perspective is that in many states the most expensive suburbs are far cheaper than the median prices in all major Australian metropolitan areas.

Long-Term Returns in the Housing Market

This article from the Wall Street Journal seems pretty solid. Let me know if you can see any flaws. The bottom line is that you shouldn't pay any more to own than to rent a house (principal + interest) because the real capital gains about match the other costs including maintenance and property taxes. Of course, that ignores any utility you get from owning rather than renting...

George Friedman

If you've been around the investment blogosphere for a while, you've probably come across the writings of George Friedman, CEO of Stratfor, a "private global intelligence firm". Today, I heard George Friedman of Stratfor speak here in Australia. I guess it was part of his global book tour. His book - the next 100 years - was on sale. Usually, I don't read the stuff he writes as it seems very

Take an Economics Test

U.S. High School "Advanced Placement Economics Test courtesy of the New York Times. I got 18/18 but for a couple of questions that was because I knew all the other answers had to be wrong rather than I knew the one I selected was right. It's all macro-economics questions.

Academia.edu

I just got an e-mail about a new social media things called Academia.edu. The organizers state: "Academia.edu was founded by Richard Price and a team of people from Stanford and Cambridge University. The aim is for the site to list every academic in the world, together with their university and department affiliation."But like LinkedIn, I'm not yet sure whether it is really much use for anything

How to Get Cited a Lot

Ultimately for an academic researcher the goal is to get your research cited and used by other people whether in their pure science work or in policy applications. Getting published is nice, but just the first step in an academic career. Also, I believe that as people get more and more familiar with the online citation databases citations will be used more and more to evaluate researchers. So, if

Book Reviews: Gladwell

I read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. While it is a good read I found it rather frustrating. I agree totally with the tone of the Wikipedia article. I guess it is too journalistic and not analytical enough. Sometimes making intuitive judgments is good and sometimes it is not. Some people are born with the abilities to make them and other times they can train to have those abilities. Well, the real

Book Reviews: Zilliak and McCloskey and Taleb

Shuang brought home borrowed copies of Ziliak and McCloskey's "Cult of Statistical Signficance" and Taleb's "The Black Swan". in a way both are rants against standard practice in quantitative analysis. But Taleb's book is ten times better or more than Ziliak and McCloskey's. The latter have a single point that researchers often misuse the concept of statistical significance and ignore the actual

Why $950?

The Australian government announced its second stimulus package today. Included is a bonus payment of "up to $A950" for every worker earning less than $A100k per year. What an odd number. But the exchange rate with the U.S. Dollar is currently 63 U.S. cents to an Australian Dollar, and if you haven't guessed already, $A950 is exactly $US600, which was the amount of the "stimulus payment" in the