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 In economics, comments have been replaced by increasingly lengthy refereeing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