An Even Sterner Review

A nice paper by Sterner and Persson points out that analyses like the Stern Review do not take into account the possibility that the prices of environmental goods will rise relative to those of anthropogenic goods and services as they become scarcer. They replace the standard utility function in Nordhaus' DICE model (which assumes infinite substitutability in consumption between environmental and

Economics: The Open Access, Open Assessment E-Journal

I'm probably late to the party here but have just been looking at the website of Economics: The Open Access, Open Assessment E-Journal. It is an effort to increase access and speed up the refereeing process, which is notoriously slow in economics. The journal has attracted a strong advisory and editorial board and is getting a good share of citations as measured by RePEc.

Only Six Days Left To Go

To vote in my climate change poll! The question is: "How much higher or lower than today do you expect global greenhouse gas emissions to be in 2050?" Note the "global" and that I want to know about "emissions" not "concentrations in the atmosphere". So far 25 people have voted and the distribution is bimodal - people seem to expect change in one direction or the other. Next week, I'll provide a

Bad Use of Citations

A paper in the British Medical Journal by Steven Greenberg examines the use of citations around a meme in the medical literature. The meme was that beta-amyloid protein "is produced by and injures skeletal muscle of patients with inclusion body myositis". Apparently this is false, but a huge number of papers state that it is true. From the abstract:"Design A complete citation network was

Climate Change Institute Open Day

Today, I attended the ANU's Climate Change Institute Open Day. There was a mix of natural and social science presentations ending with a 1 1/2 hour panel discussion featuring Tony McMichael, Warwick McKibbin, Kylie Catchpole, Andrew McIntosh, Brendan Mackey, and Ian Fry. I've found that seminars related to climate change often attract questions from climate change activists or deniers which

Why Most Published Research Results are False

A dramatic title to a paper published by John Ioannidis in PLOS Medicine. The arguments seem to be really a variant on the publication bias argument familiar in the economics meta-analysis literature. Imagine a field of study where there are no true relationships among the variables. For example, imagine that no drugs actually have an effect on a particular disease. Different researchers test the

Book Review: The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth

I have been reading The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth by Barry Naughton. It seems to be a nicely balanced objective survey of the Chinese economy covering both its evolution, especially since the key dates of 1949 (founding of the PRC) and 1978 (beginning of liberalization). As the author writes, most commentators seem to either over- or under- estimate China. And as other commenters on