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