Add Papers to Your academia.edu Profile

Academia.edu is still I think a somewhat experimental social media website. It hasn't got a lot of momentum with faculty members yet - most of the participants are grad students. This is true at Crawford School too. 27 Crawford people are on academia.edu but there are only four faculty members and two post-docs among them. This is because I think the website is most useful for people who don't

ISEE 2012 Call for Papers

Abstracts are due by 15th November. At this point, I'm not planning on attending. The last ISEE meeting I went to was in Montreal in 2004. But that was far to travel. I have enough international travel to do anyway and it is during time when I'll possibly be needing to be teaching. But if you haven't been to one, it could be worth it. The first one I went to was Stockholm in 1992, the second

Shadow Reserve Bank Board

CAMA is running a pilot project where a panel of Australian economists pick the Reserve Bank interest rate that they think is appropriate a few days before each RBA interest rate setting board meeting. It's not meant to be a prediction of what the RBA will do, but an indication of what they should do. Each economist can give a range of interest rates with different probabilities. August's chart

Ecological Economics Chapter

I've put up a complete draft of my article on ecological economics for the Encyclopedia of Environmetrics. Previously, I posted three sections of the article as blogposts. It's hard to cover everything relevant in the small number of words allocated. I've focused on controversy regarding what ecological economics is (transdisciplinary field, economics paradigm etc.) and on agreement on core

Energy Economics Course

My proposal for a course titled "Energy Economics" was approved by the College of Asia and the Pacific education committee. The course will have the number CRWF8017 and we plan to offer it for the first time in the second semester of 2012. CRWF courses are graduate courses offered by the Crawford School that have no additional prerequisites beyond those required for admission to study in one of

Why is Australia Trying to Control Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

There is a lot of misinformation floating around the blogosphere on the intentions behind Australia's recently announced climate change policy. A week ago, Stephen King listed a bunch of reasons for the policy, which does not include the true reason. And today there is a similar article on the Conversation from Paul Frijters. The real reason the government is acting is that following the

Elasticities of Substitution and Complementarity

Finally, my article in the Journal of Productivity Analysis has received page numbers. The full citation is:Stern D. I. (2011) Elasticities of substitution and complementarity, Journal of Productivity Analysis 36(1): 79-89.The article is mainly a review/survey article that organizes the literature on elasticities of substitution. It also proposes a couple of innovations along the way and gives

Google Scholar Citations

Google is launching a new service: Google Scholar Citations. Like Google+ the service is only available to a select invited few at the moment. It will allow users to update and correct their profiles much like the Author Search service in Scopus but it seems in a more user-friendly fashion. This will include merging multiple entries into a single article, a function provided by Publish or Perish.

This is Where I've Been Recently

I can't tell you anything about the IPCC meeting in Changwon City and so thought I'd post this instead. I did a day long tour from Seoul to various places near and in the DMZ including the above. I also gave a presentation at Korea Energy Economics Institute where my former student Sung Kim works since March. I talked about our study of energy and long-run growth in Sweden.

Institutions and History of Ecological Economics

Though modern ecological economics dates to the late 1980s, as a school of thought ecological economics has deep roots in thinkers who developed various forms of “biophysical economics”: Daly, Odum, Georgescu-Roegen etc. The book “Ecological Economics” by Juan Martinez-Alier documents this history [also Røpke, 1994]. The International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) was founded in 1988

New Income Tax Rates

The tax free threshold is going up and so are 15 and 30% tax rates:I can see why the higher marginal rates aren't being emphasized anywhere... The Henry Review argued for a $25,000 tax free threshold and two tax brackets - 35% and 45% with the top rate coming in at $180,000 per year income. So this goes quite a long way there. The low income tax offset will be reduced. Why didn't they just get

First Thoughts on the Australian Government's Climate Package

For those of you outside Australia, the federal government is announcing its planned climate change package today. They have the numbers in parliament to pass the legislation so we can expect this to actually happen this time. One surprise is the increase in the 2050 emissions reduction target from 60% to 80%. The carbon price will initially be $23 before a switch to carbon trading in 2015. After

Musings on Ecological vs. Environmental Economics

One way of distinguishing between environmental and ecological economics is that environmental economics has a focus on price while ecological economics has a focus on quantity. Environmental economics focuses on market failures as the main determinant of environmental problems. Seen in terms of externalities, the problem is incorrect prices and the solution is implementing the right prices. In

Postdoctoral Position with the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) network

The International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) Network, located at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment, seeks a postdoctoral fellow for a one-year appointment beginning Fall 2011. The Postdoctoral Fellow will work under the direct supervision of Professor Arun Agrawal who coordinates the IFRI network.The Fellow will conduct and support research

EPA Modifies the US Sulfur Trading Program

From Richard Woodward posting on ResEcon:"Some of you may have noticed in the news today mention of new regulations by the USEPA on SO2 and NOx emissions. The title of the articles could have been, "The SO2 trading program is dead. Long live the SO2 trading programs!"Since many of us use the SO2 program as the epitome of what a trading program should look like and teach about it in our classes,

Membership of the International Society for Ecological Economics

Doing some more work on my article on ecological economics. I was actually surprised to find that ISEE membership is at the strongest point I've seen it with 3049 members worldwide. There have been booms and busts in membership over time with particularly successful international conferences raising membership for a while and lots of changes of membership structure and location of the society

Portland State University Report Reveals Uncertain Costs, Risks of Mekong River dams

(Portland, Ore.) July 7, 2011 – The ultimate price tag of building 11 hydropower dams on the lower Mekong River potentially far exceeds the benefits to the region, according to a report released today from Portland State University and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).View the full report and video presentation The study accounts for gains through power generation,

Two Post-Doc Positions Available to Work with Simon Hay/MAP at Oxford

My coauthor Simon Hay is looking to hire two post-docs to join their team at Oxford for up to four years. One post-doc will work on "Defining the population at risk and burden of disease of Plasmodium vivax malaria" and the other on "Global dengue occurrence – present and future". The positions are funded by the Wellcome Trust.

CCEP Paper Published in PNAS

Just a few days ago I was talking about Robert Kaufmann's paper in PNAS and now we have a paper there is another paper in the journal deserving of a mention on this blog. Alessandro Tavoni, Astrid Dannenberg, Giorgos Kallis, and CCEP research associate Andreas Löschel have http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/27/1102493108.abstract?sid=783a6741-6285-4957-81a6-0542053f29a7">a paper on

SD Card Speeds Up with More Data on it?

I recently bought an SD card to use to move data between my computers at home and on campus. I was a bit dissapointed at the speed of reading and writing to the memory. It took hours to upload all my data onto the card the first time around. But now I noticed that files seem to copy MUCH faster. I put this down to the data on the card now being organized and, therefore may be more of the faster "

h(5,2) - the Best Citation Metric for Economics?

Glenn Ellison has written a paper titled: "http://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_3188.html">How Does the Market Use Citation Data? The Hirsch Index in Economics" on the use of Hirsch type citation metrics in economics. An author's Hirsch index is equal to h if they have published at least h papers cited at least h times. Ellison argues that generally economists write fewer papers than natural

CCEP Working Papers in June 2011

We continue to get a decent rate of hits this month. Frank Jotzo and Steve Hatfield-Dodd's paper "Price Floors in Emissions Trading to Reduce Policy Related Investment Risks: an Australian View" was added right at the start of the month and proved the most popular for the month.

Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998–2008

My colleague Robert Kaufmann (one of my PhD advisors and coauthor on several papers) has published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the slowdown in global temperature increase between 1998 and 2008. The Guardian has pretty balanced coverage but all the bloggers I read seemed to be upset about it both people who support mainstream science and the climate change