Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Annual Review 2019

I've been doing these annual reviews since 2011. They're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year. This year continued to feel lke a struggle at times, so it's a good idea to remind myself of what I did manage to accomplish. It felt like I was just trying to finish things this year and not succeeding but we actually started new things too. The big personal news of the year is that our second child Isaac Daniel was born:


As a result I didn't travel much. I gave seminars at Monash and Macquarie Universities and went to the Future of Electricity Markets Summit in Sydney.

We only published two papers with a 2019 date:

Bruns S. B., J. König, and D. I. Stern (2019) Replication and robustness analysis of 'Energy and economic growth in the USA: a multivariate approach', Energy Economics 82, 100-113. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Bruns S. B. and D. I. Stern (2019) Lag length selection and p-hacking in Granger causality testing: Prevalence and performance of meta-regression models, Empirical Economics 56(3), 797-830. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

and one with a 2020 date:

Bruns S. B., Z. Csereklyei, and D. I. Stern (2020) A multicointegration model of global climate change, Journal of Econometrics 214(1), 175-197. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

We posted three working papers, but only one that is really new:

Estimating the economy-wide rebound effect using empirically identified structural vector autoregressions. August 2019. With Stephan Bruns and Alessio Moneta.

We have three papers under review at the moment (one a resubmission), two revise and resubmits we are working on, and three or four we are trying to finish. So, hopefully the number of publications in the next couple of years will increase. 

Google Scholar citations exceeded 17,000 with an h-index of 52. The trend to fewer blogposts continued – this is only the 3rd blogpost this year. Twitter followers rose from 950 to 1250 over the year.

I taught environmental economics and the masters research essay course again. This was the second time teaching the environmental economics course and things went a lot smoother.

Debasish Das started as my PhD student. He is a lecturer at Khulna University in Bangladesh. We are exploring different research topics like electricity use in Bangladesh and infrastructure and growth.



Looking forward to 2020, a few things can be predicted:
  • In February I am going to the IAEE conference in Auckland, New Zealand. I will be giving a plenary on energy efficiency and the rebound effect.
  • Xueting Zhang will start as a PhD student. Like Debasish, she won an RTP scholarship, which is very competitive for foreign students. 
  • We will be submitting a paper based on the session on zero marginal cost electricity at the Future of Electricity Markets Summit to a special issue of the Electricity Journal. There are some other likely submissions and resubmissions early in the new year, but nothing is 100%.
  • I'll be teaching environmental economics and the masters research essay course again in the first semester.