Director of LSE Resigns over Libya Connections

As an alumnus of LSE I got an e-mail this morning announcing that the Director had stepped down. Here is the full announcement. Here is more background of what must have forced him out.It's strange that it was fashionable in the last few years to be involved with Libya in Western circles and now again it isn't.

Australian Data Lacunae

I spent most of yesterday at a workshop sponsored by the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism on establishing an energy efficiency framework for Australia. The government has made improved energy efficiency a priority but now faces the challenge of being able to measure progress on that goal. My main impression from the meeting was the paucity of data available in Australia on many issues

Introducing BREE

In July 2010 ABARES was formed by the merger of ABARE (Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics) and BRS (Bureau of Rural Sciences) two Australian government research agencies. Now ABARES will be effectively dismantled by transferring the resource and energy economics parts of ABARES into the Department of Resources, Energy, and Tourism to form the new Bureau of Energy and

"Academic Age" of Authors of American Economic Review Articles

Torgler and Piatti have written a massive paper on the American Economic Review with heaps of tables, graphs, and regression analyses. This is what most caught my eye:Academic age is the number of years since an author got their PhD. The modal author of an AER article is about 4 years post PhD and there's quite a low probability of publication more than 20 years post-PhD. Maybe this is why people

How Does CSIRO Compare to Australian Universities?

The Australian government http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2011/02/era-report-released.html">recently released the ERA Report, which compared research at Australian universities to the rest of the world. But this report does not evaluate the performance of CSIRO Australia's system of natural laboratories.An article by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Batterham">Robin Batterham in the

Moved Office Again!

My new office is just across the corridor from my old one in Room 2.83 JGC (Crawford Buidling #132). My new phone number is 6125-3366. This is my 4th office since starting at ANU in April 2009!

Article on John List

Saw this article on John List linked at Marginal Revolution and decided to link from here too. List has contributed to both environmental and experimental economics and is famous among job candidates in economics for "publishing up" from his initial job at Central Florida U.