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