CO2 Regulated from Today in the U.S.

From tomorrow, the EPA is regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Climate Progress has some good information on what is happening as does the New York Times. It is hard to say at this what will happen in the long-run. Most states seem to be cooperating with the EPA though Texas refuses. There is a lot of legal action in progress to try to stop the regulation. And there is a high probability

Most Popular Posts of 2010

In case you missed one of my more popular posts from 2010, I'm kicking off 2011 with a list of the top ten hits. Actually, I saw a bunch of other much bigger bloggers doing this and was curious what my most popular posts were:1. iamscientist. People are obviously very interested in learning more about this science social networking site.2. 2009 Journal Citation Report Released. And people want to

iPad Pricing

Apple charges AUD 130 more for the 32GB iPad than for the 16GB iPad. Yet a 16GB flash memory card can be bought for as little as AUD45. The premium in the US is USD 100. Interestingly, the premium for a 64GB iPad relative to a 32GB iPad is also AUD 130/USD 100. The lowest price I found for a 32GB flash drive was AUD 89. It looks like Apple makes much more profit off the higher memory versions

Institutions

Some interesting observations on social structure in China and Europe and Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize Lecture.

Flash Drives vs. Memory Cards

Since writing my previous post about memory devices I tested a class 2 (probably) Sandisk SD card from a digital camera vs. my Lexar flashdrive using the free XBench software. I was using my MacBook Pro for the tests and just plugging the Sandisk card into the SD slot on the laptop. Here are the results. First the flash drive:And here is the memory card:Data can be read faster off this flash

SD Memory Cards

In the last couple of years I have used a USB flash drive like this:as my primary computer data storage and I've used the hard drive on my laptop and office computer as data back-up and the location for the operating system and applications. This means that I can easily transport all my data from office to home and back without having to copy heaps of files back and forth and remember which ones

Marginal Cost Curve for Crude Oil

Nice figure of the marginal cost curve for crude oil:It's included in a post on the Oil Drum by David Murphy. Of course, reality is a bit more complicated than that and Murphy's article doesn't say that this is a marginal cost curve, but it does give a rough idea. Krugman is also on board for peak oil.

Getting Around the Great Firewall

As you can see, because Blogger is blocked in China, Stochastic Trend gets no visits from there:I am sure some people visit using a VPN, but I've come up with an alternative solution. Once a month I could post the source code of my blog to my website. I don't know if the images which are still all hosted by Google will be visible or not and all the links on the side that go back to Blogger will

Some Interesting Ideas

Some interesting ideas.

Marginal CO2 Abatement Cost Curves from EMF22

These are my first estimates of the marginal abatement cost curves for the four main regions based on the results of the EMF22 exercise. Here I have flipped the graph back 90 degrees again. This is private marginal cost for abating fossil and industrial emissions of CO2 using market exchange rates. The EU is the most expensive region for small cuts in emissions and India the cheapest. But for

Marginal CO2 Abatement Cost Curve for the US

So, I turned the graph 90 degrees and replaced tonnes of abatement by percent and got this:The percentage is emissions relative to business as usual. i.e. 100% means there is no abatement. 0% means there is 100% abatement. Yes, some models end up with negative emissions. And these are just fossil-fuel/industrial emissions of CO2. They assume that we will be burning biomass and sequestrating the

IEA Data No Longer Available at NLA

I'm reliably told that access to online IEA data at the National Library of Australia is no longer available. Maybe ANU ought to think about subscribing given how much climate research is going on at the university?

Marginal Abatement Cost Curve for China

The chart plots the carbon price in US Dollars (market exchange rate) against Gt of Co2 abated for China using the results from seven of the EMF-22 models. This is not really a cost curve as it includes data for different time periods and model scenarios. I've been struggling to model this data over the last 10 days or so on and off. But this is actually the first time I've plotted the data like

Polar View

Some nice maps from GISS showing temperature anomalies for November in the Arctic and Antarctic: It's clear from these, that though temperatures were low in NW Europe they were much higher than normal across Arctic Canada and Russia. For more information, visit Climate Progress

The Green Paradox

The green paradox is the idea that a policy to reduce global warming could instead accelerate the use of fossil fuels because owners extract more fossil fuels while they are still valuable. Of course, an actual cap on emissions should avoid this green paradox, but some other policies might lead to a green paradox in theory. Quentin Grafton, Tom Kompas, and Ngo Van Long have written a paper titled

Linking Book Chapters to Your Website

With Google Books it's now possible to provide links to your book chapters online without posting your own pdf of the chapter. For example:Stern D. I. (2004) The environmental Kuznets curve, in: P. Safonov and J. Proops (eds.) Modelling in Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.I already provide links from my publication list to RePEc for all my journal articles in RePEc (one way to

Paul Burke's Graduation

I went along to Paul Burke's graduation as Doctor of Philosophy at ANU on Friday. As you can see I was in "civilian clothing" and sat in the audience. Here the hooding ceremony is performed by the Chancellor of the University (Gareth Evans) rather than by the graduate's PhD adviser,* as is the practice in the US. Actually, I hadn't been to a graduation in Australia before and there were some

OCEAN-OIL

Boston University, Louisiana State University, and the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) have created a resource that will allow you to explore questions regarding the causes, magnitude and consequences of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, as well as to contribute your own expertise.The Online Clearinghouse for Education & Networking: Oil Interdisciplinary Learning (OCEAN-OIL)

"Elasticities of Substitution and Complementarity" to be published in Journal of Productivity Analysis

My paper Elasticities of Substitution and Complementarity has been accepted by the Journal of Productivity Analysis. The paper surveys the various definitions of the "elasticity of substitution" and puts them into a framework that explains their relationships and purposes. It includes the new definition of Hicks Elasticity of Substitution based on the input distance function as well as

Box Plots in Excel

Strangely, Excel does not have a chart type for "box plots". In general, it's graphing capabilities are not that great. You can make an approximation to a boxplot chart using some obscure options which are quite hidden away. I used these instructions to come up with this:Not quite as pretty as the example in Wikipedia, but probably good enough.

Google E-Books

I got an e-mail from Edward Elgar Publishing this morning announcing that they are joining Google's E-Books initiative. It was launched yesterday and is only available in the US so far. Seems it is yet another new format but will be available for many devices (unlike Amazon's Kindle).

Proposal Tips

Actually, the article is titled "How to Fail in Grant-Writing". It's kind of funny. Well, some of it is. I'm re-working my (unsubmitted) ARC proposal from last year right now...

IPCC Position Available

IPCC is looking for Programme Manager, Communications and Media Relations based in Geneva.

CCEP Debuts on RePEc at 17th in Australia

The Centre for Climate Economics and Policy, which was just recently launched, enters the RePEc ranking for Australian economics institutions at 17th (roughly top 14%). CCEP is a network of researchers working on climate issues directed by Frank Jotzo of the Crawford School at ANU>. We have a working paper series also on RePEc (which I am administering) and a conference/workshop is planned for

What is Business as Usual for China and India?

My paper with Frank Jotzo in Energy Policy argued that while India's goal of cutting emissions intensity by 25% between 2005 and 2020 was likely to be similar to the business as usual reduction in emissions, China's goal was much more ambitious. China aims to reduce emissions intensity by 40-45% over this time frame, while we estimated it would decline by 24% under business as usual.By contrast,

CCEP Working Papers Now on RePEc

You can now download CCEP Working Papers from RePEc. Since launching the series with six papers we have added a further paper by Leo Dobes: "Notes on Applying ‘Real Options’ to Climate Change Adaptation Measures, with Examples from Vietnam.

The Role of Energy in Economic Growth

A few months ago I serialized a paper I was revising on the role of energy in economic growth. I didn't include all the material in the paper and it wasn't serialized in order. The paper will be appearing next year in Ecological Economics Reviews, which is an annual edition of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. A working paper version of the paper is now available in the new working

Greg Combet

Today Greg Combet, Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, spoke at the Crawford School on "Australia in a climate changed world – Moving forward to Cancún and beyond". Frank Jotzo and Carolyn Hendricks gave follow-up presentations on international and domestic aspects of the current climate change policy debate.The Australian is emphasizing his reiteration of the 5% unconditional

Highly-Cited Papers are More Likely to Cite Highly-Cited Papers

An interesting paper in PLOS ONE performed an analysis of all papers published in 2003 that are included in the intersection of the Scopus and ISI databases. They find that the most cited papers in the following 5 years are more likely to cite other highly cited papers than lower ranked papers are to cite highly cited papers relative to how much each group cited less highly cited papers. This is

A Clarification, 14 Years On...

Maybe it is a bit late for this, but quite a few papers I get sent for review cite our 1996 paper in World Development as a rationale for estimating an environmental Kuznets curve model for a single country. We wrote:"We believe a more fruitful approach to the analysis of the relationship between economic growth and environmental impact would be the examination of the historical experience of

EEN Symposium on Monday

The http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2010/10/een-symposium-22-24-november.html">EEN Symposium at the Crawford School starts on Monday. I'm giving my presentation at 1:30pm. The slides are here. For more details on the Symposium please visit the Crawford School website.

Call for Papers

The Journal of Industrial Ecology has a call for papers on the topic of "Greening Growing Giants". Quoting from the call:"Questions relevant to this special issue include but are not limited to: What quantities of resources will be required globally in the near future, given the current dynamics of per capita resource use in developing countries? What role does the demand in industrial countries,

Madsen et al.: Four centuries of British economic growth: The roles of technology and population

In a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Growth* Jakob Madsen et al. test the ability of alternative endogenous growth theories to explain the British Industrial Revolution. They conclude that Schumpetarian growth theory can explain the data while "semi-endogenous growth theory" cannot. Madsen recently won an ARC fellowship to pursue this research further. Interestingly, when the change

Did Incomes Grow in Pre-Industrial England?

This is a current point of contention among economic historians. Gregory Clark thinks that in the long-run they did not though they fluctuated considerably. In the wake of the Black Death incomes were high due to the increase in land per worker and they subsequently fell as population grew till eventually rising gain as the industrial revolution approached. I think this much is agreed but the

Recent Papers of Interest in Ecological Economics:

van den Bergh, J. C. J. M., Environment versus growth — A criticism of “degrowth” and a plea for “a-growth”, Ecological Economics.van den Bergh makes a much more extensive version of the main argument I made in my review of Tim Jackson's book Prosperity without Growth. There aren't policy levers that can directly stop growth and it might not be what is needed to solve environmental problems

Article Level Metrics

Public Library of Science are providing an Excel file with details of citations and page views for all 18,000 + articles that they've published so far. Not sure what to do with it apart from note that the most viewed article is Why Most Published Research Results are False. It's only the 7th most cited article though. The winner by that metric is "Human MicroRNA Targets". The correlation between

World Atwitter

This is just very cool:One minute of global Twitter activity.

ARC Releases Proposed Changes to Discovery Program

They are looking for feedback on the proposals, but are planning to put them in place in time for the next round of Discovery applications in around 4 months time exactly. The main changes from what I gather are:1. A new separate fellowship for early career researchers (ECRs).2. The regular Discovery scheme will no longer take any special note of ECR applications.3. "there will be revised

Seminar 9th November

Just a reminder that next Tuesday 9th November at 2:00pm I will be giving a seminar at the Arndt Corden Division of Economics on the role of energy in long-run economic growth. I'll be happy to send you a copy of my paper if you e-mail me. We hope to get it up on the web in a formal working paper series soon at which point I will blog about it. Abstract and details are here.

CCEP Working Papers Launches

Yesterday, CCEP: Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at ANU was launched. The Centre has around 30 associates. The majority are from outside ANU and several are from outside Australia too. We already have the first working papers up on the website.

EEN Symposium: 22-24 November

The EEN Symposium will take place between 22nd and 24th November at the Crawford School at ANU. The symposium will showcase the results of the research carried out by the Environmental Economics Research Hub as well as presentations of 14 invited papers from outside researchers. My presentation is at 1:30pm on Monday, 22nd November.Registration is free! You can find the full program here.

ARC Funding Outcomes Announced

The Australian Research Council announced it's decisions on applications for Discovery and Linkage grants today. Congratulations to Frank Jotzo and Peter Wood on the success of their application. Also, congratulations to my colleague in the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Prof. Athukorala whose proposal with Peter Robertson: "Sustaining India's economic transformation: challenges, prospects

Porsche Develops Hybrid Technology

I blogged about the development of hybrid cars by BMW and Mercedes when I was visiting Munich. My point was that fuel economy standards were forcing luxury car makes to adopt hybrid technology. I saw this as a route to wider adoption of hybrid technology in mass-market cars. Non-luxury hybrids seem so far to only appeal to "green consumers" willing to pay a premium for lower fuel consumption.

Tests for Non-Linear Cointegration

It took more than 25 years since the discovery of cointegration for someone to come up with general tests of cointegration in nonlinear regression models. Choi and Saikkonen published a paper on the topic in the June issue of Econometric Theory. One place where this might be relevant is, of course the environmental Kuznets curve, where Martin Wagner argued that standard cointegration methods

Survey Paper on Estimating Consumer Demand Systems

If you are looking for a nice survey paper on estimating static consumer demand systems (I was) Apostolos Serletis and William Barnett put one out a couple of years ago in the Journal of Econometrics. It's a nicely organized paper that should be understandable to anyone who's done the basic graduate level micro-economics and econometrics courses. In other words, it is really approachable compared

Why You Should Have a Blog

(if you are an academic)The vast majority of hits on my website that originate with Google are from people entering keywords closely related to my name. By contrast, Google Analytics shows that almost no-one looking for my name arrives at my blog. So the blog attracts an audience that would be unlikely to arrive at my website and check out my publications on all the topics that I write about on

Index Numbers and Consistency in Aggregation: Part II

This post gets even more technical than the last. I'm just blogging about what I'm reading in the course of my research. I read a whole bunch more papers on index numbers, which got more and more technical. The bottom line is that for most applications the chain Fisher index is an appropriate index to use. An index is superlative if it is exact for an aggregator function (e.g. a production

Index Numbers and Consistency in Aggregation: Part I

There are many formulae for the index numbers used to compute price and quantity indices, such as a consumer price index or a volume index of imports, in economics. The Laspeyres, Paasche, Divisia, and Fisher indices are the best known of these formulae. A body of theory examines the criteria that can be used to decide which formula to use in a particular application. One important property is

Launch of Centre for Climate Economics and Policy

The launch of the new Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at ANU will be on 27th October following the Asian Climate Change Policy Forum. The new centre will be directed by Frank Jotzo. There will be a working paper series, which will take over from the EERH Working Papers in the area of climate change.

Writing and Publishing Tips from Nature

Very good advice (almost all of which I follow myself) from Nature on writing and publishing. My only caveat is that there is a real trade-off in economics between getting published in reasonable time and getting published in the top journals. The top journals have very slow review processes and very high rejection rates. Not all of them use the "desk reject" system used by top natural science

Causes of the Demographic Transition

Oded Galor has made many contributions to growth theory and population economics and the connections between them. A http://ideas.repec.org/p/bro/econwp/2010-12.html">new working paper examines various economic theories of the causes behind the demographic transition. In Galor's terminology the demographic transition refers specifically to the decline in fertility rates and population growth.

Energy Efficiency Report Part II

Reading through the report they seem to come to ">similar conclusions to me on Australia's track record on energy efficiency. The main goal is a 30% reduction in Australia's energy intensity by 2020. This implies an annual reduction of 2.6% per annum. Since 1980 energy intensity has declined by 1.3% per annum so the target is fairly ambitious in seeking to double this historical rate.The

Report of the Prime Minister's Task Force on Energy Efficiency

The report of this group commissioned during Kevin Rudd's period as prime minister was released about a week ago. I gave a presentation to some members of the team earlier this year on my work comparing Australian energy efficiency to that of other countries. So I was particularly interested to see what they came up with. One interesting point for academic economists is that the extensive

John Ionnanides

For those of you interested in meta-analysis, the Atlantic has an interesting article on John Ioannidis (needs subscription I think?). I've written about him previously and his paper "Why Most Published Research Results are False". This article gives more color about him and his research group. On a related note, you can now get my article on meta-analysis of interfuel substitution for free at

Tips for Choosing a Title for a Paper

I'm having a harder time than usual in deciding on a title for our latest paper. For some reason none of the alternatives I have seem good. So I looked on the web for some ideas and the following seem to be the key useful ones:1. Make sure there are the main keywords in your title. You may think that your abstract will handle that. Google Scholar thinks otherwise.2. Shorter is better than longer,

The Story of Climate Change Legislation in the Obama Administration

Peter Wood pointed out this story in the New Yorker, which chronicles the history of the so far failed attempts by the Obama Administration and various senators to legislate on climate change policy.

Is the Drought Over?

As you can see from the above graph, after a long period of standing at about 50% capacity, Canberra's dams are now at around 80% capacity. All the dams in the Western catchment in the Brindabella-Namadgi mountains are near capacity. Googong to the east which is half the total capacity is only at 60%. But that too is an improvement. As we flew into Canberra on Thursday we could see that the

Back Home

I'm finally back from my trip to Europe (mainly work) and Asia (mainly family visit/vacation). As an Australian the only country we visited that seemed expensive overall was Denmark. Sweden no longer seems to be a terribly expensive country as it once seemed to be. The Big Mac index doesn't agree though. Thailand, our last stop, is of course way cheap but I noticed that drinks in Starbucks don't

LEGS

I attended a meeting of the LEGS Platform who are funding my visit to Lund. LEGS stands for Long-term Energy Growth and Sustainability. As the website says: "It a new platform for inter-faculty and interdisciplinary knowledge creation and exchange at LUSEM (Lund University School of Economics and Management). It was founded March 2009 on the basis of a strategic decision by the vice chancellor of

Generosity

Peter Martin reports on a generosity index. It combines data on charitable giving (which is highest in the US) with volunteering of time, and willingness to help strangers. In combination, Australia comes out top. It's worth also checking out some of the countries that come in with very low scores. One of these is China. We often here about a lack of trust in China and these numbers bear that out.

Another Push Towards a Directly Elected Executive President?

Back in June when Rudd was ousted I suggested that in the long-term that move could help push Australia towards adopting an executive presidency once the Republic was back on the agenda. Yesterday's emergence of a Gillard-Labor government with a one seat majority backed by the two relatively conservative independent MPs is another nudge in that direction I think. People commenting in the media

Endogenous Price of Lighting Services

Another potential issue with the Tsao and Waide and Tsao et al. work on demand for lighting is that the price of lighting services is to some degree endogenous. If this is the case then estimates of a model of the sort suggested in my previous post will be subject to simultaneity bias. So why might the price be endogenous?First, there are the usual reasons that we are not separating the effects

Tsao & Waide: "The World’s Appetite for Light"

Following up yesterday's post I looked at the study that provided the background for the paper studied there:Jeffrey Y. Tsao and Paul Waide:"The World’s Appetite for Light: Empirical Data and Trends Spanning Three Centuries and Six Continents"LEUKOS VOL 6 NO 4 APRIL 2010 PAGES 259 – 281This paper gives a figure of per capita light consumption and GDP/cost of light:I drew the thick black line on

Will the Adoption of Solid State Lighting Lead to an Increase in Energy Use?

The Economist discusses an article in Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics by Tsao et al. on the effects on energy use of the adoption of solid state (i.e. LED) lighting (SSL) on global energy use. The Economist argues that it would be better to keep incandescent bulbs as a result. This seems a bit crazy. The literature on the rebound effect suggests that for energy saving innovations for

EERH Research Reports: August 2010

Peter Wood's paper on game theory and climate change continues to be popular this month. Follow this link for all the other stats.

Powerpoint Slide for Crawford School Research Retreat

Role of Fuel Economy Standards in Effecting Technological Change

I was fascinated to learn yesterday that Mercedes has paid the US government $300 million in fines due to violating the CAFE standards. As fuel economy standards continue to rise manufacturers will need to find innovative ways to reduce the fuel consumption of their luxury and sports models in order to end up with acceptable cross-fleet mean fuel consumption figures. The interesting thing is that

Submitted my Main Hub Paper

I finally submitted the main report on my Environmental Economics Research Hub project to a journal. It took a while because I wanted to approach the paper fresh in order to hack out around 5,000 words to get it down below 10,000 words. And I've been busy working on completing a bunch of other projects, as you may have noticed. I blogged about the paper when I finished the working paper back in

Seminar at Lund

If you are going to be in southern Sweden or eastern Denmark, you may be interested that I will be giving a seminar on 15th September at the Department of Economic History at Lund University. Topic: "The Role of Energy in Long-Run Economic Growth". I don't know the time or exact location yet but I'm sure the department can help out on that. For those of you in Canberra I will be speaking on the

Turnbull on the NBN

Turnbull argues that the NBN essentially is the re-nationalization of Telstra (link requires registration but is free) just like the original RSPT was the partial nationalization of the mining industry.

ANU Speed Test

Yesterday, I blogged about internet speeds within Australia and between Australia and the US from our home in Canberra. Today, as promised I'm presenting the results of the same test conducted from my office at ANU:Within Australia, ANU has access to NBN-like speeds (at least before the new 1GBs announcement). Between, Australia and the US the speed is much lower, though much faster than what we

Internet Connectivity

Joshua Gans has been discussing internet speeds between different parts of the world and running some tests. So I ran my own tests from home and speeds are pretty low just between my home and a server in Canberra:Our ISP sucks apparently, but most of the time I find our internet service to be adequate. Except when it isn't. Here's the test to San Jose, CA:Only a bit slower... What I should do

Ecological Economics Reviews

A while back I did a series of posts that serialized a paper I was revising on energy and growth, starting with this post. The paper has now been accepted for publication in the 2011 issue of Ecological Economics Reviews, which is a special annual issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences edited by Bob Costanza and Karin Limburg (Rated B by the ARC BTW). I just now have to switch my

George Fane Seminar @ Arndt-Corden Division of Economics

I went to George Fane's seminar yesterday on "The Taxation of Rents from Mineral Resources". It was well-attended by both people from ANU and the public service. The seminar might have provided the answer to http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2010/05/royalties-vs-rent-taxes.html">my confusion about why the Henry Review and most economists discussing it argue that royalties are inefficient, while

Interfuel Substitution: A Meta-Analysis - Accepted for Publication

My paper on the meta-analysis of interfuel substitution has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Economic Surveys (an A-rated journal).

Peter May's Review of "Prosperity without Growth"

I don't remember seeing this before, except in the form of a special review section - Two reviews of the same book in the same journal. http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2009/11/review-of-prosperity-without-growth.html">You've seen my version. Now here is Peter May's version.

Change of Date for Seminar

Change of date for my forthcoming seminar. It will now be on 9th November. All the other details remain the same.

EERH Research Reports: July 2010

EERH Research Reports continued to enjoy an uptrend in downloads last month. Peter Wood's paper Climate Change and Game Theory was the most downloaded. Globally, RePEc crossed the 25,000 barrier in terms of the number of members with registered publications. I highly recommend all economists who aren't registered yet to register and make themselves more visible to the economics research community.

University Websites

There is a lot of discussion going on about this cartoon. I find that university websites vary a lot in usability. Usually I am looking for either a page about a specific faculty member and what they research and teach and a list of their publications and maybe a CV. Other times I want an overview of a department or research centre. But a lot of websites are only geared to either selling the

Joseph Stiglitz Speaks at ANU

I went to see the "Crawford School Oratory" today given by Joseph Stiglitz - just one of the stops on his Australian tour. As you probably know he is a Nobel Prize winning economist who was chief economist at the World Bank and since then has been critical of both the Bank and the IMF and increasingly of other financial institutions and free market oriented capitalism in general. The talk was

Switching from html to pdf

Since 1995 I have had a file called sterncv.html on the web. It was created by Laura Guild at Boston University and has followed me around the world till eventually it settled on sterndavidi.com. But now I have deleted it and switched to a pdf CV only. I still have all my publications listed on two webpages with links to RePEc or journal websites. The reason I made this change are:1. Most other

Excellent Advice for a Research Career

Shuang linked to this excellent advice on selecting research topics. I have tried to follow these rules in my career. I had no idea though that they had been written down by someone in this form. Occasionally though the need to get money and/or get published fast has over-ridden these guidelines, but as long-term criteria I think they are very good if you are really a serious/ambitious researcher

Famous Rejections

In a posthumously published paper, Clive Granger discusses the evolution of the idea of cointegration. It turns out that his famous 1987 paper with Engel in Econometrica was rejected twice (without an invitation to resubmit). The first version was sole authored. The second one was dual authored "but it was also rejected for not being sufficiently original"! That's one of the papers that won Engel

Inheritance and Economic Growth

I am reading an interesting paper by Thomas Piketty on inheritance and economic growth. It's a long paper with lots of stuff in it. But here is the key point. They construct time series for inheritance (both bequests and inter-vivos transfers) for France over almost 200 years. One source is French estate tax data and the other a model of demography, saving etc. The gap between the two series (

Seminar 26th October

I know this is a long time off, but I just agreed to do a seminar at 2pm on 26th October in Seminar Room B, Coombs Building, ANU. Title is: "The Role of Energy in Long-Run Economic Growth". I will report on my work in collaboration with Astrid Kander at University of Lund on energy and growth in Sweden over a couple of centuries. I also have started supervising a graduate student as part of an

NOAA State of the Climate 2009

I've been looking for a "state of the world" article for the class I will be teaching in Lund. Today, NOAA released their annual report on the state of the climate. That is an excellent example of the kind of thing I'm looking for. Now, if I could cover energy trends, pollutants, biodiversity etc. as well as the climate in one article that would be great. It's pretty easy to find reports on such

Strategic Behavior and the Environment

Another new journal in the environmental economics space. I've never heard of the publisher but the editor is Ariel Dinar (UC Riverside) and they have a bunch of well known people on the editorial board. It's not quite as star studded as the board of Climate Change Economics but still pretty impressive.

Suggest an Article for My Students

They'll only be my students for one guest lecture. They are students in a business masters who are taking an environmental economics class. The textbook for the class is undergrad level and a bit old (they cover the whole book in 3 weeks). I need an overview article about global trends in energy, pollution, climate change, biodiversity, the more the merrier over the last decade at least to

Gillard's Climate Initiative

The main feature of Gillard's climate policy announced today is to run a 150 person citizens' jury on the issue. Strangely most of the green activists quoted are against the idea but many of my colleagues in ecological economics would probably think this was a great idea in principle. Shuang's first reaction was though that: "it will be tough to handle 150 people".Gillard also said that under a

Global Map of Forest Canopy Height

NASA has produced a cool map of world forest heights. Woodlands and savannas are not included so the green areas are a very low end estimate of world forest cover.

IAmScientist

My wife passed on an invitation she got to join a new site called I Am Scientist. Seems to be yet another competitor with ResearchGate, Academia.edu, CoS, ResearcherID and for economists RePEc. This site mainly seems to have medical scientists signed up so far. No-one yet seems to have the momentum of Facebook or LinkedIn in the academic space.

Jobs Websites

VoxEU now has a jobs website. It has a lot of European jobs listed, which nicely complements the U.S. focus of JOE (JObs for Economists). For Australian jobs, UniJobs is pretty comprehensive. Just put the keywords you are interested in into their search engine.

Australian Federal Election Called

Joshua Gans is endorsing Labor. Not much of a surprise. Australian economists mostly seem to be left wing though he seems a bit less so than many. John Quiggin is endorsing the Greens. I just posted this on Quiggin's blog:"Well I expect Andrew Leigh will be my new member of parliament. I do favor voting Green as first preference * as a signal to the major parties. That’s what I usually do. The

China Update

Yesterday, I attended the China Update at ANU. One of the benefits of attending is getting a copy of the book produced for the conference which I am looking through at the moment. Not all chapters were presented at the conference and not all conference papers are in the book.I was most interested in three topics discussed at the update and in the conference book: Calls from China-based

New Office

I just moved office. I'm now in Room 4038 in the Coombs Building which is in the area occupied by Resource Management in the Asia Pacific though I'm still attached to the Arndt-Corden Division or Department. My phone number is 6125-1609. But the best way to contact me as usual is by e-mail. I like this office better than my old one actually. It's bigger, has a real wooden desk, and has much more

Call for References: The Role of Energy in Economic Growth

Back in April I did a series of posts on energy and economic growth which serialised a review paper I was editing on the topic. A couple of those have been among my post popular posts in the last few months. Now I am revising the paper again for the final version. The referees made a lot of comments but I am also reading some additional papers and seeing if they fit into the story. So if you

Climate Spectator

Business Spectator is an Australian financial news website that is today launching a new venture: Climate Spectator. Looks like it will be interesting.

Development and Environment Data

One of these was released last year and the other earlier this year but, I guess, better late than never!Free Data from the World BankThe World Bank now offers free access to more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics that had mostly been previously available only to paying subscribers. The data can be accessed via the ">data catalog. This includes the

New Sulfur Dioxide Dataset

Steve Smith of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and his team have completed work on their dataset of sulfur emissions from 1850 to 2005 by country and year. The paper is available for discussion on Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics' website.I've known for a while that this dataset was under development, which is the main reason why I haven't updated my own estimates of global sulfur

Gittins Enters the Economics Consensus Debate

Ross Gittins agrees with Ken Henry that academic economists need to get behind "reforms". I don't understand this presumption that economists should all be in agreement about all policies that the government happens to come up with. I disagreed with the basic rationale for the RSPT as presented in the Henry Review. I see royalties as a charge by the resource owner not as a priori a "distorting

EERH Research Reports: June 2010

Downloads of EERH Research Reports crept up a bit more last month as we brought more papers online. We now have 64 papers in the series. Additions to RePEc in the last month include:EERH46: Testing construct validity of verbal versus numerical measures of preference uncertainty in contingent valuation, Sonia Akter and Jeff W Bennett.EERH55: Prerequisites and limits for economic modelling of

The RSPT is Dead Long Live the MRRT!

The Commonwealth Government * is announcing changes to the RSPT. The interest rate is 7% above the government long-term bond rate, the rate of the tax is 30% no refunds of losses and it only applies to iron ore and coal. It is being rebadged the "Minerals Resource Rent Tax". The existing Petroleum Resource Rent Tax will be extended to onshore coal seam gas production.These are changes which the

Between Estimates of the Emissions Income Elasticity

My paper Between Estimates of the Environmental Kuznets Curve has been accepted for publication by Ecological Economics. I changed the title though to "Between estimates of the emissions income elasticity", which seems reasonable given that I don't reject a log-linear relation between (sulfur and carbon) emissions and income per capita. So I confirm the findings of Wagner (2008) and Vollebergh et

Martin Parkinson Gives the Sir Leslie Melville Lecture

This lecture was part of an annual series in memory of economist Leslie Melville who was the second vice-chancellor (=president) of the Australian National University. Parkinson, who has a PhD in economics from Princeton, made a point related to ">Ken Henry's recent comments. He said that there was limited engagement on climate change among Australian economists (with exceptions such as Ross

Top Environmental and Energy Economics Journals

Following on from my post on the 2009 Journal Citation Report I've extracted a list of energy and environmental journals. I've ranked them by "Article Influence Score":Article Influence Score is a recursive impact factor. It is derived from the Eigenfactor Score by scaling for the number of articles published by a journal and for the average number of citations received by all journal articles. A

Jotzo and Stern Paper to be Published at Energy Policy

Our paper: How Ambitious are China and India's Emissions Intensity Targets? has been accepted for publication at Energy Policy.

New Climate Change Economics Journal

A new journal published by World Scientific titled: Climate Change Economics has been launched. The aims and scope statement states:"Climate Change Economics (CCE) publishes theoretical and empirical papers devoted to analyses of mitigation, adaptation, impacts, and other issues related to the policy and management of greenhouse gases. CCE is specifically devoted to papers in economics although

2009 Journal Citation Report Released

ISI has released the 2009 edition of the Journal Citation Report. Ranking journals by the traditional two year impact factor:The first thing I notice is how impact factors have been increasing rapidly in recent years. At least the top journals are getting considerably more citations to their articles. Also, REEP, JEEM, and Ecological Economics are all in the top 20 journals by this measure. In a

IPCC AR5 WGIII Authors Announced

This won't get much attention in this country, today :), but the IPCC has formally announced the lead and coordinating lead authors for the IPCC 5th Assessment Report.

Long-Term Outcomes?

My initial thoughts on tonight's developments * in terms of long-term effects is that this could lead for a push for a republic with an executive president and/or longer government terms which give the prime minister more time to implement the government's policies and show that they are working before an election needs to be called. Both ideas have been floated before, of course, and the first

McKibbin on Henry

Following on from yesterday, Peter Martin has a post today where he interviews Warwick McKibbin. I mentioned McKibbin in my comments yesterday. I mostly agree with what McKibbin says in Peter Martin's post. What he doesn't mention and what shocked me the most, though, was that Henry's comments were an attack on academic freedom/freedom of speech from a government official. That is anti-democratic

Ken Henry Tells Economists to Get Behind Policy Proposals

And stop arguing in public reports Peter Martin. Would we argue that medical doctors who believe there are problems with some treatment should not speak out because it is better than no treatment at all and the medical profession should form a united front to the public? What is the proper role of academic economists in policy debates? Do you agree with Henry?

Chalmers Introduces Online Climate Model for Public Use

Christian Azar and Daniel Johansson, at the Division for Physical Resource Theory at Chalmers University of Technology, have built a simple climate model for online use, the Chalmers Climate Calculator. The model is an easy-to-use tool meant for anyone who wants to learn more about the climate problem. Journalists, students, policy makers, and international negotiators, along with everyone else,

Where is it Cheapest to Cut Carbon Emissions: Estimating Marginal Costs

This is the second part of a series on my new working paper on where it is cheapest to cut carbon emissions.In the previous post I assumed that all countries shared the same marginal cost of abatement curve. In reality this is not the case and in order to rank countries by marginal cost of abatement or total costs of meeting a given policy we need to estimate a cost curve for each country. The

Nature Feature on "Metrics"

This week's issue of Nature has a feature on citation metrics and their use. There seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction with their use:I presume that most people think they are used too much and too indiscriminately. I wish that they were used more in economics in Australia. But as there is a lot of noise in the relationship between paper quality and the number of citations received,

Jerry Hausman on the RSPT

MIT economist Jerry Hausman has an article in The Australian today that includes a link to his full paper. As I suspected, real option analysis comes into play here.

Where is it Cheapest to Cut Carbon Emissions?

The answer to the question depends on what you mean by "cheap". In other words, how you measure cost.I have a new working paper coauthored with Ross Lambie that attempts to answer the question using the results of the GTEM modeling exercises carried out as part of the Australian Treasury review of climate change policy.Development of policy on the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions has in many

New Energy Blog

Cutler Cleveland, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Boston University has a new blog on energy issues: The Energy Watch. He is editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of the Earth, edited the Encyclopedia of Energy, and was editor of Ecological Economics for several years. He was also my PhD advisor :)

Is Too Much Research Being Published?

The authors of an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education certainly think so. The article seems to be behind the curve on what is happening:1. Here in Australia, for example, government financial incentives to universities used to favor quantity explicitly over quality but that has changed. Depending on the field either journal quality or number of citations will be the way things are

New EERH Research Reports

We've put up several more Environmental Economics Research Hub Research Reports on the web. #63 is coauthored by Ross Lambie and myself and I will be blogging soon more about that one. We've also corrected all the problems in our RePEc file so several older ones that were missing from RePEc are showing up properly now too.

How I Keep Up To Date on the Scientific Literature

I suppose that most academic's reading can be divided into two categories: Specific reading for projects you are working on; general background reading. Most people probably don't have enough time for the latter so it is important to maximize the value you get from the time applied. After finding a very useful paper yesterday, though I was disappointed to find that I had been "scooped" to some

ResearchGate

I just received an e-mail invitation to join ResearchGate. I'd never heard of this network before. In contrast to Academia.edu it seems to be organized more on disciplinary lines than institutional lines. I looked through some of the names of people who have registered under environmental economics and saw only one I knew. So it seems to be even less successful than Academia.edu so far at

Was There No Little Ice Age?

Morgan Kelly and Cormac O Grada have a new working paper titled: The Economic Impact of the Little Ice Age. But their main point seems to be that there wasn't much of a Little Ice Age at all. Rather there were some years with particularly bad weather in the middle of the last millennium. If temperatures are smoothed using moving averages these bad years will reduce the temperature of extensive

TV Ad Campaigns

Though both the government and the union movement are running TV ads for the RSPT, I've only seen the mining industry's anti-RSPT TV ad so far:Apparently, I'm not in the target demographic that either the government or the unions think they can influence. I'm amused how the guy says "if it goes ahead" and it sounds like he's talking about all that investment that's on hold rather than the

UCL Australia

University College London has opened a program in Australia in collaboration with oil and gas company Santos. They are offering interdisciplinary graduate certificate, graduate diploma, masters (2 years including a 9 month internship), and PhD programs. So far, they have 4 academic staff in Australia with the head of the program, Prof. Tony Owen, recruited from Curtin University of Technology (

Ben Smith on the RSPT

Ben Smith, who did some research in the past on resource rent taxes, has an article in today's Australian on the RSPT. He favors the pure "Brown tax".

Associate Director: Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices

The Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices at Portland State University is http://www.uvm.edu/~ikubisze/Associate Director hr_posting_csp_001.pdf">searching for an associate director. Bob Costanza has just been appointed as director of the center. If you are interested in the position, please follow the directions in the linked pdf.

Equations in Microsoft Word 2008

The equation editor in Microsoft Word 2004 was incompatible with the latest Macintosh operating system, rendering some symbols in equations incorrectly. So I "upgraded" to Word 2008. But now when I saved a document in the new .docx format all equations were converted to pictures. Some online research showed that the bug was due to interaction between footnotes and equations. I got around this bug

Changes to CRU Database

I recently wrote about the controversy regarding climate change and malaria. I've now applied a couple of different models to both the data we used in our 2002 Nature paper and data from the latest version of the CRU database. Our Nature paper used an older version of the CRU database. One of the models I used was the basic structural model also used by http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2010/05

RSPT: Lack of Transparency is the Issue

From the point of view of the mining industry and their potential financial bankers in the banking industry there are two key issues:1. How are existing projects where the government hasn't been accounting itself as a passive shareholder to date to be dealt with.2. Whether the government is really going to refund losses in the event of a project failing. The miners and banks are saying they place

IPCC AR5 WGIII

The IPCC has just announced the authors for the Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change). I am one of the selected authors and will be agreeing to participate. I will be working on a team working on Chapter 5: "Drivers, Trends, and Mitigation".

Exploratory Analysis of Chaves and Koenraadt

A couple of days ago I mentioned the Chaves and Koenraadt paper on malaria. I've looked over it a bit since but would really have to repeat the analysis myself in order to come up with anything conclusive as the time series analysis is so poorly documented. To recap, here is the temperature time series from Kericho in Kenya that they use:One of the models they fit is the basic structural model.

CERF National Conference

In a last minute substitution I am going to be presenting instead of Regina Betz at the CERF National Conference at Old Parliament House on Tuesday at 1pm. Title will be "Modelling Global Energy Efficiency Trends". I'll try to cover both implications for Australian energy efficiency and Chinese and Indian emissions intensity targets in the 15 minutes allowed.

New Controversy on Malaria and Climate Change

Some of my coauthors on our work on malaria and climate change have an article (with others) in the latest issue of Nature. Their main point is that even if climate change has had an effect on the prevalence of malaria in the last century, that effect is swamped by everything else that has been going on. Also that the current distribution of malaria endemicity is no guide to future trends. Both

More on the RSPT

I read a couple more papers on resource taxation and am not much clearer about things. Ben Smith wrote about the impossibility of a neutral resource rent tax and Diderik Lund wrotea recent review.It is pretty clear that a pure "Brown tax" where the mining company immediately gets refunded the tax rate (say 40%) multiplied by all losses minimizes the effect on investment decisions as long as the

Garnaut Says RSPT Needs More Study

Ross Garnaut says that the RSPT needs more study and analysis and that the government hasn't handled this well. Importantly, Garnaut co-authored the paper that initiated interest in such a tax.I'm planning to produce a blogpost soon with some more discussion of the complications involved with this tax. My impression is that the authors of the Henry review did not read recent literature on the

Paper Accepted at Economics Letters

My paper Derivation of the Hicks, or Direct, Elasticity of Substitution from the Input Distance Function has been accepted for publication at Economics Letters. As I've mentioned before, the elasticity of substitution measures the difficulty of replacing one input to production such as energy with another such as capital, usually under the assumption that the level of output must be kept constant

Updated Versions of Papers

An updated version of my paper "Between Estimates of the Environmental Kuznets Curve" is now available in the CAMA Working Paper Series. Also my article "Energy Quality" has been published in Ecological Economics.

Public Policy Precinct at ANU

Lots of public policy initiatives are planned at ANU in which the Crawford School looks to play a major role:ANU Media ReleaseSATURDAY 8 MAY 2010ANU TO ESTABLISH $111.7 million PUBLIC POLICY PRECINCTThe Australian National University (ANU) will play a lead role inboosting Australia's expertise through enhanced teaching and research inpublic policy and will establish a new Australian National

Royalties vs. Rent Taxes

I'm now reading the Henry Review in more detail. The argument against royalties and in favor of a rent tax, which was put forward by Garnaut and Clunies Ross is based on the idea that both are taxes. Because the royalty allows no deductions for costs it acts as an incentive against development of more marginal projects that would have gone ahead in the absence of the tax. The Brown tax

ReSPecT

My immediate reaction to the RSPT proposal was to wonder if it will ever get through parliament as proposed and to suggest that at least the hurdle rate needed to be substantially raised. Today in the Australian, Henry Ergas discusses the "Brown tax" named after E. Carey Brown. I'll admit that I hadn't heard that term before. A quick search found a reference to this in a working paper by Ben

EERH Working Paper Statistics for April 2010

This month's RePEc statistics are in. EERH saw a slight tick up in downloads, probably due to us getting more papers online. We now have 55 papers online.

It's the Economy Stupid

There is all this discussion in the UK about why the Labour Party looks set to lose the election and no-one makes the obvious point: there is (or was) a bad recession and the government has been in power for 13 years. Still it is going to be interesting what happens coalition-wise post-election. I'm a British citizen, so I have some interest I guess...

Will Today's Tax and Superannuation Proposals Actually be Implemented?

Based on the Rudd government's record to date I don't expect these "reforms" to be implemented as announced. The Liberal-National Coalition will oppose them. I expect that the Greens will like them. So, based on the current composition of the Senate, it will depend on Xenophon and Fielding and I have no idea what they'll think. Of course, the legislation would likely wait till after the election.

Angus Maddison Dies

Just heard that Angus Maddison died. The Economist has an obituary. I visited Gronigen a few years ago but didn't get to meet him. Just a few days ago I was checking his data on historical GDP. The work of my colleagues such as Astrid Kander and Paul Warde follows in this tradition in reconstructing the energy history of Europe.

Beyond the environmental Kuznets curve: Diffusion of sulfur-emissions-abating technology

A group of students in Sweden sent me some questions about my paper:Stern D. I. (2005) Beyond the environmental Kuznets curve: Diffusion of sulfur-emissions-abating technology, Journal of Environment and Development 14(1), 101-124.The paper is fairly technical and so I thought it might be useful to post my responses here.What would you say is the main question in the framework of

Blue and Red States and Climate Change

Source: U.S. EPA, Climate Change Indicators in the United States, April 2010.The map above shows that there has been more climate change on average in "blue states" - those that vote Democratic than in "red states" - those that vote Republican in the US. The colors are neatly reversed (here they are the traditional blue for conservative and red for left wing). Does this partly explain the divide

The Environment and Directed Technical Change: Acemoglu et al.

Acemoglu, Aghion, Bursztyn, and Hemous put out an interesting NBER Working Paper last October. The abstract is below. They carry out a simulation which shows that a carbon tax alone is significantly inferior in terms of loss of consumption to a combination of a carbon tax and clean technology development subsidy. Results depend on the elasticity of substitution between dirty and clean inputs and

How Should We Adjust Economic Institution Rankings for Size?

RePEc provides a ranking of top level economics institutions as well as the number of authors at each institution. This ranking has been criticized online because it ranks MIT below the World Bank, NYU, and Columbia. Everyone knows that that isn't true. But how could we come up with a better ranking? If bigger institutions are better up to a point then it won't help us to either have the original

Energy and Growth Survey: Conclusions

We conclude that the theoretical and empirical evidence indicates that energy use and output are tightly coupled with energy availability playing a key role in enabling growth. However, the greater availability of energy, technical progress, and the employment of higher quality fuels has allowed less energy to be used per unit output and has reduced the constraint that energy resources place on

Position at Lund University

Lund University are advertising a position in sustainable development and energy. You need to be less than 5 years post-PhD except in attenuating circumstances. You need to be able to teach in English. The emphasis is on the research side. My collaborator Astrid Kander is director of the platform for economic energy research at Lund and you can contact her for more information. I'm planning to

Grattan Institute CPRS Report

The Grattan Institute has a report on the CPRS out today. The CPRS is in hibernation or maybe dead but the report argues as most of us did that the compensation proposed by the government was not economically justified. Here is their blurb:"Like much of the world, Australia has debated putting a price on carbon emissions (a “carbon price”) with an emissions trading scheme or tax. A carbon price

Shifts in the Composition of Output

This is the penultimate section of the paper that I'll post. Now I'm going on to rewriting the conclusions and then a massive edit. I've got 15,000 words and 179 references!Shifts in the Composition of OutputOutput mix typically changes over the course of economic development. In the earlier phases of development there is a shift away from agriculture towards heavy industry, while in the later

Innovation and Energy Efficiency

Changes in the energy/GDP ratio that are not related to changes in the relative price of energy are called changes in the autonomous energy efficiency index (AEEI, Kaufmann, 2004). These could be due to any of the determinants of the relationship between energy and output listed at the beginning of this section and not just technological change. Even A in (3) is just general TFP and, therefore,

Do Liberal Arts Programs Work?

Can anyone point me to research on the effectiveness of the liberal arts model of education popular in US and Chinese universities compared to the more specialized approach prevalent in Europe and Australia? Which results in better educated citizens? This is particularly relevant with the advent of the "Melbourne Model". Is this a good compromise between the various models?

Econometrics and Economics

I went to two presentations at ANU recently by well-known American economists" Joshua Angrist and Frank Lichtenberg. Angrist presented work on the charter school in Lynn, MA. The presentation was clear and I thought quite impressive and convincing in showing a major impact of attending the school on students' performance, at least in mathematics. Lichtenberg showed the effect of diagnostic

Substitutability of Energy and Capital

There is a large empirical literature on the issue of whether capital and energy are substitutes or complements and on how substitutable they are (e.g. Berndt and Wood, 1979; Apostolakis, 1990; Thompson and Taylor, 1995; Frondel and Schmidt, 2002; Thompson, 1997; Stern, 2007; Koetse et al., 2008). Substitutability can be measured using the Hicks or direct elasticity of substitution, which

The Ecological Economics Critique

This is a long section of the paper. Again if you have suggestions for additional references etc. please let me know. Either you'll get your paper cited or your help acknowledged in the final paper.IntroductionEcological economists derive their view of the role of energy in economic growth from the biophysical foundations of the economy discussed above. While mainstream growth theory focuses on

Neoclassical Growth Models with Resources and Technical Change

Another installment. I'm more uncertain about whether I'm getting the story right here. So comments are even more welcome. I've had none so far :(Growth Models with Resources and Technical ChangeIn addition to substitution of capital for resources, technological change might permit growth or at least constant consumption in the face of a finite resource base. Stiglitz (1974a) showed that in a

Energy as a Factor of Production

This section is almost unchanged from the 2004 version. I haven't seen anything recent that adds much to what's here. Have you?Energy as a Factor of ProductionThe potentially critical role of energy in economic production and growth is dictated by basic physical principles. The laws of thermodynamics and the conservation of matter describe the immutable constraints within which the economic

Energy Mix and Energy Intensity

The series continues:Energy Quality and Shifts in Composition of Energy InputIn the course of economic development countries’ fuel mix tends to evolve as they move up the “energy ladder” (Hosier, 2004). Burke (2010) documents a similar progression for the power sources used in electricity generation. In the least developed economies and in today’s developed economies before the industrial

The Rebound Effect

The latest episode. Comments please.The Rebound EffectThe Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate (Brookes, 1990; Khazzoom, 1980, Berkhout et al., 2000), or "rebound effect," argues that energy saving innovations induce an increase in energy consumption that offsets the technology derived saving. Rebound effects can be defined for energy saving innovations in consumption and production. A consumer consumes

Polynomial Cointegration and the Global Warming Hypothesis

Michael Beenstock and Yaniv Reingewertz have a fairly new working paper that applies the method of polynomial cointegration to testing the global warming hypothesis. This paper has apparently been discussed quite a bit in the blogosphere.The authors find that they cannot reject the null hypothesis that the forcing variables that they consider do not polynomially cointegrate with global

Call for Papers on Climate Policy

Harry Clarke, the Editor of “Economic Papers: A Journal of AppliedEconomics and Policy” is seeking papers on climate change economics forthe June issue of the journal. The deadline is the end of April, papers receivedafter that may be considered for the September edition.

Frank's Blogpost

Frank Jotzo has a blogpost about China's emissions intensity target.

Debate on Unit Roots in Temperature Series

A huge debate with 1672 comments erupted on Bart Verheggen's blog regarding the issue of unit roots in temperature series. I didn't read much of it, but the main point seems to be that when there are unit roots in time series you need to take that in account when determining if there is a trend in the series and it is harder to reject the null of no trend. This is all true but you can also

Introduction: Energy and Growth

So you know where this paper is going, here is the introduction as it currently stands:IntroductionIs energy an important driver of economic growth and development and if so what factors affect the strength of the relationship between energy and growth? Toman and Jemelkova (2003) argue that most of the literature on energy and economic development discusses how development affects energy use

Serializing Energy and Growth Review Paper

I'm updating my 2004 working paper on energy and economic growth to submit to the annual Ecological Economics Reviews published in the Annals of New York Academy of Sciences. I did publish a short version of the working paper as a chapter in the Encyclopedia of Energy but I didn't submit it to a journal because some of my fundamental ideas about energy and growth began to change just after I

Krugman on Climate Change Economics

Paul Krugman has an article on climate change economics in the New York Times Magazine. He agrees with Weitzmann that we should think about avoiding catastrophic impacts rather than trying to finesse a standard cost-benefit analysis based on the expected impacts and argues that CGE models that find the cost of mitigation to be low are probably overstating the costs.

Progress on China's 2005-2010 Energy Intensity Target

Stephen Howes provides an update on China's progress on its energy intensity goal. This goal was always very ambitious just like China's goal of reducing emissions intensity by 40-45% by 2020 is very ambitious. The modest progress made so far on the energy intensity goal does not bode well for China meeting the emissions intensity goal either, though they could surprise us. This was one of my

How Much Should an Online Product Cost?

Chris Guillebeau asks readers how much he should charge for his products. Could he have learned from the contingent valuation literature? :)

EERH Working Papers Statistics for March 2010

The http://logec.repec.org/scripts/seriesstat.pf?item=repec:een:eenhrr">RePEc report for March is now out:Abstract views and downloads for the EERH Research Reports seems to have stabilized around 300 and 120 a month respectively. Follow this link for details of individual papers. We still need to get details for the most recent 12 papers onto RePEc. You can download those papers from the EERH

Legal Origin Strikes Again

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4817">van Ewijk and van Leuvensteijn have an article in VoxEU arguing for the EU to reduce taxes on residential mobility. What struck me was this chart:The highest transactions costs are in French legal origin countries, moderate costs are seen in German and Scandinavian legal origin countries and the UK has the lowest costs. Ireland is stuck in the middle of

Environmental Valuation and General Equilibrium

I'm not a fan of most approaches to non-market environmental valuation and one of my criticisms is that once all externalities would be internalized all market prices would change including in turn the valuations placed on the current non-market goods. Existing valuations of non-market environmental goods are partial equilibrium estimates which could be very misleading. I haven't always

U.S. Survey of Earned Doctorates

If you are a statistics (in sense of data) junkie, there is plenty of fascinating info in the NSF's Survey of Earned Doctorates. Did you know for instance that only 7% of Saudis want to stay in the US after getting a PhD whereas 89% of Iranians do?Total numbers of doctorates in the US continue to grow - mainly in the sciences and in particular life sciences and engineering. There is moderate

Final Hub Report

The final report for my Hub project titled: "Modeling International Trends in Energy Efficiency and Carbon Emissions" is finally http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/eeneenhrr/1054.htm">up on the EERH website. I've highlighted the key results in previous posts so not so much to add here. This paper also has a lot of literature review and a theoretical model as well as the econometric model and

RePEc Expands Listings

Christian Zimmermann lays out recent and upcoming changes to RePEc which will include somewhat expanded rankings. I think this is a good move, but I still think that they should just list the top 20 or 25% for all the different rankings. Why list the top 25% for countries and US States but only the top 10% for fields?

Google Scholar Weirdness

Google Scholar appears to update their database about once every 10 days. Then every 2-3 months they do a more fundamental reorganization, pruning multiple entries, shuffling things so articles appear again exactly in the order of most cited etc. In this most recent shuffle the main entry for my 1996 World Development paper disappeared entirely from their system. None of my other articles seems

Link to Frank's Presentation

You can find a video of Frank's presentation on Tuesday here.

Coverage in The Australian

The Australian had a story today covering our research:

How Ambitious are China and India's Emissions Intensity Targets?

Following Frank's presentation we have http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/eeneenhrr/1051.htm">a new working paper up with the same title as this blogpost. This is an updated version of the papers I presented at the AARES conference and the EERH Hub Workshop in Adelaide in February.The revised model includes variables for capital and human capital inputs. This has important effects on the estimated

Media Release: Developing Countries Set Climate Benchmark

As I mentioned, Frank Jotzo will be giving a presentation at the Crawford School today (Tuesday, 23rd March) on his work on comparing countries' Copenhagen targets and our joint work on the ambition of China and India's emissions intensity targets. Below is the media release we are putting out. We are also putting out an EERH working paper, details to follow.TUESDAY 23 MARCH 2010DEVELOPING

John Cochrane's Tips

John Cochrane's writing tips for PhD students. He also has some good tips on presentations in the paper. But I can't see how you can go directly to your results if people don't yet know what you are trying to do, what your question is and what your model is etc.

Some Things Coming Up...

I haven't blogged much this month as I've been very busy, mainly on trying to finish my EERH Hub project and set up the next stage in my career. A couple of the things coming up soon:Frank Jotzo will be giving a presentation at the Crawford School at 12:30 on Tuesday analyzing the emissions reduction targets put forward by countries at Copenhagen. This will include our joint work on China and

Purchasing Power Parity vs. Market Exchange Rates

Latest in a series of articles by Richard Tol criticizing the IPCC AR4 WGIII report. This article focuses on the effect of using market exchange rates or purchasing power parity adjusted exchange rates (PPP) to project future emissions. Models that use market exchange rates, including the IPCC SRES projections project higher future emissions and emissions growth than models that use PPP exchange

EERH Working Papers Statistics for February 2010

RePEc stats for February are out. Total abstract views and downloads seem to have stabilized now. The most popular paper this month is Evers et al. on the economics of ethanol production

Sounds Like a Headline from the Onion!

But it's a New York Times article: Union College Finally Admits Where It Is. I lived for 5 years in Troy, NY about 25km east of Schenectady and also in the Albany metro area when I was teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I think that Troy is worse than Schenectady if anything. I first arrived there in March for an interview and the cab-ride from the railway station in Rensselaer (I came

World Trade Report 2010

The 2010 World Trade Report will be about trade in natural resources. In the run-up to publication the World Trade Organization is inviting discussion on the topic. Go to their website to participate.

Journal H-Index

Tabulating journals' h-indices is a simple but effective way it seems of ranking them. At least this list makes a lot of sense to me. The ARC could just use that to rank journals, instead of asking for expert opinion. RePEc's ranking only includes citations extracted by the CitEc system. In my case, they only total about 1/6 of my total documented citations. But the resulting ranking seems to

What Do Australian High School Economics Students Need to Know?

Peter Martin links to the most recent HSC and VCE exams in economics. HSC is the high school diploma level exam in New South Wales. Looking through it, it is largely comparable to the college level Intro Economics course I taught in the US with the following differences:1. It's almost entirely macro-economics instead of a 50:50 balance of micro and macro2. There's a very strong emphasis on

Australian Energy Efficiency in Context

Slides for a presentation I will be giving on Tuesday on putting Australia's level of energy efficiency into context. Here's a quick guide...Slide 3 compares Australia's energy intensity (energy/PPP GDP) to 5 developed and 2 developing economies. Australia is mid-way between the US and Canada on the one hand which are relatively inefficient by this measure and Germany, Japan, and the UK which are

Why do Real Economists (and Environmentalists) Hate Stated Preferences?

The only people who like them are some mainstream environmental economists who use stated preference methods, I think. I have a semi-coherent rant in the comments.

The Best University for Economics in Australia

It's either Melbourne or ANU. You'd have to think that good potential grad students are now using the RePEc ranking as a major input to decide where to go to study as as we all know economics is a discipline that is obsessed with rankings and pedigree. I know that several of my colleagues haven't registered in RePEc yet. If they did, it might help push ANU ahead of Melbourne. Of course, I haven't

Why the ARC is not Counting Citations in Economics?

Check out the top Australian departments in RePEc's global ranking. All but QUT have lower ranks based on their citation scores alone than on the basis of all 31 indicators combined. The same is true of the individual Australians in the global ranking (they are harder to find as country affiliation isn't included in the table so you have to search for people by name). Not counting citations will

ESA vs. ERA

The Economic Society of Australia put out its own list of ranked journals last year. Both this list and the ERA list have 37 journals ranked as A* but there are four differences between the two lists. The ESA list included the following four journals that are not in the ERA list:Journal of Environmental Economics and ManagementJournal of Business Economics and StatisticsJournal of Risk and

Poverty and Progress: An Ecological Model of Economic Development

I remembered Mick Common mentioning this book and I saw that it was referred to by http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2009/08/allen-british-industrial-revolution-in.html">Robert Allen. I found that ANU's library had a copy but it was nowhere on the shelves and I put in a missing book search request. It couldn't be found. So I was surprised to get an e-mail while I was in Adelaide telling me to

Decarbonization in Australia?

Roger Pielke has a working paper about the potential or rather the lack of potential for decarbonization of the Australian economy. He says it would be very hard to achieve the Government's targets given historical rates of decarbonization in both Australia and other countries. Penny Wong has reacted that this ignores international trade in permits or offsets. She is right, Australia doesn't plan

ANZSEE vs. AARES

I think that John Tisdell (now at U. Tasmania) and myself are the only two people who attended both the ANZSEE meeting in Darwin and the AARES meeting in Adelaide. There may be others. Sorry, if I forgot about or didn't notice you, but there is certainly not much overlap in participants. Similarly, we found that there was some overlap in topics covered and journals cited by ecological and

ERA Ranked Journal List is Out

The ARC (Australian Research Council) has finally released the ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) ranked journal list that will be used in this year's research assessment exercise. As I've commented that the assessment of economics will not count citations and so the ranking of journals is all that counts in measuring research outputs. All journals are ranked as A*, A, B, and C. A* is

AARES 2010 Paper

Greetings from Adelaide! My first time in South Australia. I just put up a draft paper for our presentations at the AARES meeting here in Adelaide. Papers were meant to be submitted by January 15th to get on the "Conference CD". We ignored that deadline but didn't completely forget about producing a paper :) I'm presenting today, Tuesday, on this topic as part of the annual Environmental

ERA 2010

Detailed information is now available for the ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) 2010 exercise to be carried out by the ARC (Australian Research Council). This is similar to the research quality assessment exercises carried out in the UK. The only social science where they will use citation analysis is psychology. I can see no reason not to use citation analysis in economics except for

In Press

My paper on energy quality was accepted by Ecological Economics. Since returning to academia in November 2008 I've been trying to get published, so it is nice to finally have a success. I probably could have two more if I worked harder to get my other two "revise and resubmit" papers revised and resubmitted.

Long-run Elasticity of Demand for Energy?

I just realised that the elasticity reported in my slides for the Hub workshop for the effect of the purchasing power parity variable on energy intensity is kind of a global price elasticity demand for energy in the long-run. Because it is estimated on averages for the 1971-2007 period it averages out all fluctuations in prices over time except countries' relative price levels compared to the

Slides for Hub Workshop

Here are the slides for my presentation at the Environmental Economics Research Hub 2010 workshop in Adelaide on Tuesday. They have a lot of overlap with http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2010/02/chinas-emissions-intensity-target-bau.html">my presentation to the China forum we just had at ANU, but there are a couple of new things. There's a slide of global energy intensity. There's also a slide

China’s Emissions Intensity Target: BAU, Feasible, or Infeasible?

I've put up some slides that I'm planning on using at a forum with some people from the Chinese government here at ANU this week that are a preview of where I'm heading for my presentations at the Environmental Economics Research Hub Workshop and AARES Conference in Adelaide next week. There isn't much text on the slides. The basic story is that I use a model of energy intensity to extract the

Energy Quality

I just got a "revise and resubmit" for my paper on energy quality. I think the comments should be easy to deal with by putting in a bunch of caveats. I now have three paper resubmissions to deal with but have been so busy with everything else (Environmental Economics Research Hub project, ARC proposals etc). After the Adelaide conference I really need to get to these...

Gapminder

Gapminder have produced one of those cool animated bubble graphs from my sulfur data, you can play with it here. They also have an interactive stack chart. Here is the founder of Gapminder, Hans Rosling in action at TED.

Comment Moderation

Because of spam comments from this this guy and others I'm turning on comment moderation for older posts...

But Swedish Social Scientists are Right Wing

According to this new study Swedish social scientists are more likely to vote for the right wing parties than left wing parties. This is of course, in marked contrast to the situation in the US and anecdotally in Australia. The authors note though that:"Here we have to keep in mind that an american academic to the left may, in actual views, be close to a swedish academic to the right."However,

Too Big to Fail

The Obama administration is acting to do something about the too big too fail phenomenon, which I flagged as a possible policy direction. I'm not enthusiastic though about the anti hedge fund/proprietary trading moves that are accompanying this. Luckily none of the crazier ideas in Jackson's book are included. I'd favor limits on risk budgets rather than just banning institutions from certain

Conservatism of Non-Academic Scientists

There's been discussion lately about how "liberal" professors are (at least in North America). For example, this blogpost and the paper by Ethan Fosse and Neil Gross. The latter argue that people with liberal political views are more likely to want to become professors. Demographic differences explain 43% of the difference in liberalism between professors and others.The interesting thing to me is

ARC vs. NSF

I've been doing more work on my upcoming ARC proposal including meeting with ANU's pro-VC for research (who used to work at the ARC as "Executive Director, Humanities and Creative Arts and as the co-ordinator of the Discovery Projects scheme") and getting her feedback. I've commented before that compared to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) the Australian Research Council (ARC) appears

Follow Up on Europe Research Links

A while ago, I mentioned that I signed up for an EU database of experts. I've now been contacted twice through being a member of this database. The first query was from a consulting firm who need an Australian reviewer on their proposal to the European Union and the second to review a grant proposal (paid) from Cyprus. So it's not a blackhole you throw your name into and never hear anything again

Scott Brown

This doesn't seem to be getting much attention in Australia but it's bad news for getting anything done in the US in the next few years...

Analysis of Copenhagen Accord

Interesting analysis of the Copenhagen Accord from Carlo Carraro and a coauthor. He argues that if the funding for developing countries is primarily used for mitigation actions then the Accord could achieve the goal of getting the world on the path towards the 2C limit on warming. I'm skeptical though that the money will:1. Be spent at all - often aid pledges turn out not to be realised...2. Not

A Picture of price and markets

We can picture the circular flow of economic life in the picture above. The diagram provides an overview of how consumers and producers interact to determine prices and quantities for both inputs and outputs. Note the two different kinds of markets in the circular flow at the top are the product markets,or the flow of outputs like pizza and shoes, at the bottom are the markets for inputs or factors of production like land and labor. Further, See how decisions are made by two different entities ,consumers and business.
Consumers buy good and sell factors of production, Business sell goods and buy factors of production. Consumers use their income from the sale of labor and property. Price in good markets are set to balance consumer demand with business supply; Price in factor markets are set to balance household supply with business demand.
All this sounds complicated. But it is simply the total picture of the intricate web of interdependent supplies and demands, Interconected through a market mechanism to solve the economic problems of what how and for whom. Look at the picture carefully.a few minutes spent studying it will surely help you understand the working of market economy

Market equilibrium

At every moment, some people are buying while the others are selling firms are inventing new products while governments are passing laws to regulate old ones; foreign companies are opening plants in America while American firms are selling their product abroad. Yet in the midst of all this turmoil, Markets are constantly solving the what, how, And for whom. As they balance all the forces operating on the economy, Markets are finding a market equilibrium of supply and demand.
A market equilibrium represents a balance among all the buyers and sellers. Depending upon the price, household and form all want to buy or sell different quantities. the market finds the equilibrium price that simultaneously meets the desire of buyers and sellers. Too high a price would mean a glut of goods with too much output; too low a price would produce long lines in stores and a deficiency of goods. those prices for which buyers desire to buy exactly the quantity that seller desire to sell yield on equilibrium, of supply and demand.

Three problems of economic organization

Every human society, wether it is an advanced industrial nation. A certainly planned economy ,or an isolated tribal nation must confront and resolve 3 fundamental economic problems. Every society must have a way of determining what commodities are produced, how these goods are made and for whom they are produced. Indeed these three fundamental questions of economic organization what, how ,and for whom are crucial today as they were at the dawn of human civilization.
To answer that three questions , Every society must make choices about the economy input and output .Input are commodities or services that are used to produce goods ,And outputs are the various useful goods or service that result from the production process and are either consumed or employed in further production.
Another term for input is factor of production. These can be classified into the broad categories, Such as: Land, Labor, Capital
Restating the 3 economic problems in term of input an outputs, A society must decide(1)what output produce, And in what quantity (2)How to produce them that is, By what techniques inputs should be combined to produced the desire outputs, and (3) For whom the outputs should be produced and distributed.

Consumption Based Carbon Tax

An interesting proposal from Geoff Carmody for a consumption based carbon tax. It cleverly plays on protectionist sentiments and impulses by taxing the carbon content of imports and exempting exports. Every country can set its own carbon tax rate or coordinate as much as they like. I imagine this must have been proposed before. It sounds like a good idea but I can see two major pitfalls:1. Will

Arndt-Corden Division of Economics Joins the Crawford School

As many of you know the Arndt Corden Division of Economics became part of the Crawford School at ANU from 1st January. Following the merger the Crawford school is now ranked 7th or 8th * among economics programs in Australia according to RePEc. I only informed RePEc of the merger yesterday (don't know if anyone else did but they didn't say they already knew) so the change isn't reflected in many

Zhang et al. Now on RePEc

The official version of the Zhang et al. working paper on the effect of environmental news on stock prices is now up at RPI and, therefore, catalogued in RePEc.

Convergence of Energy Efficiency

I've been making more progress in my Environmental Economics Research Hub Project. I still don't have final results, but I am close. The above chart shows the estimated underlying energy efficiency, controlling for the structure of the economy etc. for five countries. I don't quite believe that the US is more efficient than Switzerland but at least the two developing economies are less efficient

EERH Working Papers Statistics for December 2009

A few less downloads and abstract views this month, but December is always a weak month for working papers. For all the details visit the LogEc website

Energy/Capital Ratio and Capital Density

Back in October, I blogged about the energy/capital ratio arguing that it was a rough proxy of the level of energy efficiency and/or environmental technology in a country. The following chart plots the energy/capital ratio against the capital density - the amount of capital per unit land area in a country (both are averages for 1971-2007):Now there could be quite a lot of explanations of the

The Kuznets Curve

The evidence for the original Kuznets curve - a supposed inverted-U shape relationship between inequality and income per capita - is not very strong either. The Y axis shows an average of the available data on the Gini coefficient of income inequality for the period 1971-2007 (mostly from the World Development Indicators) and the X axis average income per capita over the period in 2007 PPP

Corruption and Development

Most of my readers are probably familiar with the correlation between corruption and the level of economic development, but as I was entering the data into my database I thought I'd go ahead and blog about it. The chart shows the 2007 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index on the Y axis and average income per capita over the 1971-2007 period in 2007 PPP dollars (from the Penn

There are More Chinese Students in Australia than in the U.S.

It is hard to believe that there are 50% more Chinese students in Australia than in the U.S. which has 14 times the population of Australia. Digging around on the web I found plenty of other articles from different sources corroborating the 130,000 number.

Krugman on China

I don't want to turn this blog into some kind of pro-China rant but I keep reading so many occidentcentric articles that just fail to see things in any kind of balanced way. Krugman says that China should revalue the Yuan. In the long-term I agree, as the Chinese currency is clearly undervalued. And China was doing exactly that prior to the Global Financial Crisis when they halted abruptly:The