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