Annual Review 2022

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 was the second year since I have been back living in Canberra in 2007 that I spent the entire year in the Canberra region (extending to the coast) and the second year since 1991 that I didn't fly on a plane. I also haven't been outside of Australasia since 2018. It's pretty hard to travel for any length of time without taking the family and with two small children neither of us feels like traveling anywhere very far. I think we can finally say that the pandemic is over when ANU finally lifted their mask mandates in late October. The university seems pretty dead post-pandemic outside Kambri at lunchtime. Some of our students are still stuck in China etc. but even people who are in Canberra have been reluctant to show up. Graduation week in mid-December showed a flurry of activity.

Kambri

For the first three months of the year, I was supposedly on long service leave (LSL). This might sound good, but actually it is a sacrifice of close to AUD 50k that I would otherwise have been paid out when I retired. I did it to help the university's budget... In return I only taught one course this year. But I ended up agreeing to teach a course that was new to me: IDEC8018 Agricultural and Resource Economics. This turned out to be a huge amount of work in terms of preparation. I started working on the course in February. So, I'm not sure I gained much from my LSL. The main benefit is that I have now managed to move my teaching to Semester 2, which I think is better.  I taught lectures in hybrid mode – an in-person lecture livestreamed on Zoom. Tutorials were split between an in-person and an online tutorial. I think the course went well given it was the first run and there were various hiccups along the way. The teaching evaluations are strong.

 

The main new research I did this year was our paper on confidence intervals for recursive journal impact factors. This research followed up on my 2013 Journal of Economic Literature which computed standard errors and confidence intervals for journal impact factors. Back then, I speculated that confidence intervals could be computed for recursive impact factors and now we've done it. As usual, various collaborative research projects are in progress. Some are mentioned on my research page. I also worked with Ida Kubiszewski and Bob Costanza on a paper on the field of ecosystem services, which we have already published.

I only published two papers with a 2022 date:

Berner A., S. Bruns, A. Moneta, and D. I. Stern (2022) Do energy efficiency improvements reduce energy use? Empirical evidence on the economy-wide rebound effect in Europe and the United States, Energy Economics 110, 105939.

Jafari M., D. I. Stern, and S. B. Bruns (2022) How large is the economy-wide rebound effect in middle income countries? Evidence from Iran, Ecological Economics 193, 107325.

and one with a 2023 date: 

Kubiszewski, I., L. Concollato, R. Costanza, D. I. Stern (2023) Changes in the authorship, networks, and research topics in ecosystem services, Ecosystem Services 101501.

We have one in press paper:

Timilsina, G., Stern, D. I., and D. Das (in press) Physical infrastructure and economic growth, Applied Economics.

Following ANU signing read and publish agreements with Elsevier and Taylor and Francis among others, these will be my first open access articles in hybrid journals.

We only posted one new working paper:

Confidence Intervals for Recursive Journal Impact Factors. June 2022. With Johannes König and Richard Tol.

We have two journal articles under review at the moment. There are a lot of other papers on my to do list, but they range from one we are actively trying to complete, to ones that I haven't really done anything on any time recently and ones that may never happen.

I gave a couple of online conference and seminar presentations. The first was in March in the FEEM Economic Modelling Seminar Series on the topic of Asymmetric Response of Carbon Emissions to Changes in GDP and Negative Oil Market Shocks. The second was a presentation at Enercon 2022, The 3rd International Conference on Energy and Environmental Economics, hosted by the University of the Philippines Los Banos in July. I was asked to give a presentation on the environmental Kuznets curve.

Google Scholar citations exceeded 23,000 with an h-index of 58. I wrote fewer blogposts this year. Eight in total compared to fifteen in 2021. Twitter followers rose from 1650 to almost 1750 over the year. I reviewed 13 journal articles, two tenure or promotion cases, one book proposal, and one grant proposal. I think about one of these per month is about the right number. So, I turn down quite a lot of journal article and some grant review requests. I prioritize journals that I have published in or have been reviewed by recently.

My PhD students Xueting Zhang and Debasish Das continued their research. Suryadeepto Nag has been visiting Crawford to work with me on his master's project, which I am jointly supervising, since late November. We are researching the impact of electrification on development in rural India using Indian survey data.

Looking forward to 2023, a few things can be predicted:

• I will be teaching IDEC8053 Environmental Economics in addition to Agricultural and Resource Economics in Semester 2.
• We hope to wrap up our paper on electricity markets with 100% intermittent renewables as soon as possible.
• I am also working on an ARC Discovery Projects grant proposal on electricity markets with Akshay Shanker, Tim Neal, and Michael Keane. It should be submitted at the beginning of March. 
• I'm hoping to go to my first post-pandemic in-person conference in Melbourne.