Assessing Students during the Pandemic

Last week I was a panelist at an ANU webinar on assessing students during the current pandemic conditions.

You can watch just my part where I talk about reorganizing my course to deal with online exams:

Or the whole discussion here:

Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Work

I think that robots/artificial intelligence and the future of work is a hugely important topic. This is a very active research field but it seems to me that people (some informed by this research but most without referring to the research) are rushing to one of two conclusions. The first of these conclusions is that up till now economic growth has resulted in rising wages and full employment and so it surely will in the future too. The other is that robots must mean structural unemployment and so the solution is to introduce universal basic income or some similar redistributive policy.

I don't think either is necessarily true. In the past, the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital seems to have been less than one - both inputs were essential in production. Also, the two inputs are q-complements - an increase in capital per worker results in an increase in the marginal product and, therefore, wage of a worker. But it's possible that now, or in the future, that the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital is or will be greater than unity so that labor is not an essential input. Or that there are techniques that are designed just to use machines. Acemoglu and Restrepo (2016) assume that as some low-skilled tasks become automated other new high-skilled tasks are introduced. But there may be limits to people's cognitive ability. Most people aren't intelligent enough to be engineers and scientists. And the people that are intelligent enough now, might be worse than artificial intelligences in the future.

The other premature conclusion is that, definitely things are different now, and robots will result in structural unemployment or immiserizing growth, so that government intervention is needed. Usually, universal basic income is mentioned. Sachs et al. (2015) argue immiserizing growth is possible. This is one of the better papers out there I think, but still the framework is quite limited. as technological change is exogenous. It is possible that there is some self-correcting mechanism similar to that in Acemoglu's (2003) paper on capital- and labor-augmenting technical change. In that model, capital-augmenting technical change is possible for a while, but it introduces forces that return the economy to a pure labor-augmenting technical change path. Another important question is whether people have a preference to have at least some of the goods and services they consume produced by humans. Sachs et al. assume that utility is a Cobb-Douglas function of automatable and non-automatable goods. That means that consumption of human made goods could become infinitesimally small in theory.

I think we need to consider a range of models as well as empirical evidence before we can say what kind of policy, if any, is needed.

I wanted to do research on this and started doing some research on this but concluded that it is not realistic given my limited time for research because of my administrative - I am still director of our International and Development Economics Program - and parenting roles and my existing research commitments. Twitter isn't the only reason that I haven't updated this blog in 2 1/2 months. Comparative advantage suggests to me that I remain focused on energy economics. However, I think that the Crawford School of Public Policy should be looking at these kind of issues, and I am trying to encourage that. This is going to be one of the key policy questions going forward I think.

Mid-Year Update

It's the first official day of winter today here in Australia, though it has felt wintry here in Canberra for about a week already. The 1st Semester finished last Friday and as I didn't teach I don't have any exams or papers to grade and the flow of admin stuff and meetings seems to have sharply declined. So, most of this week I can just dedicate to catching up and getting on with my research. It almost feels like I am on vacation :) Looking at my diary, the pace will begin to pick up again from next week.

I'm working on two main things this week. One is the Energy for Economic Growth Project that has now been funded by the UK Department for International Development. I mentioned our brainstorming meeting last July in Oxford in my 2015 Annual Report. I am the theme leader for Theme 1 in the first year of the project. In the middle of this month we have a virtual workshop for the theme to discuss the outlines for our proposed papers. I am coauthoring a survey paper with Paul Burke and Stephan Bruns on the macro-economic evidence as part of Theme 1. There are two other papers in the theme: one by Catherine Wolfram and Ted Miguel on the micro-economic evidence and one by Neil McCulloch on the binding constraints approach to the problem.

The other is my paper with Jack Pezzey on the Industrial Revolution, which we have presented at various conferences and seminars over the last couple of years. I'm ploughing through the math and tidying the presentation up. It's slow going but I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! This paper was supposed to be a key element in the ARC Discovery Projects grant that started in 2012.

In the meantime, work has started on our 2016 Discovery Projects grant. Zsuzsanna Csereklyei has now started work at Crawford as a research fellow funded by the grant. She has been scoping the potential sources of data for tracing the diffusion of energy efficient innovations and processing the first potential data source that we have identified. It is hard to find good data sources that are usable for our purpose.

There is a lot of change in the air at ANU as we have a new vice-chancellor on board since the beginning of the year and now a new director for the Crawford School has been appointed and will start later this year. We are also working out again how the various economics units at ANU relate to each other... I originally agreed to be director of the Crawford economic program for a year. That will certainly continue now to the end of this year. It's not clear whether I'll need to continue in the role longer than that.

Finally, here is a list of all papers published so far this year or now in press. I can't remember how many of them I mentioned on the blog, though I probably mentioned all on Twitter:

Bruns S. B. and D. I. Stern (in press) Research assessment using early citation information, Scientometrics. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Stern D. I. and D. Zha (in press) Economic growth and particulate pollution concentrations in China, Environmental Economics and Policy Studies. Working Paper Version | Blogpost
 
Lu Y. and D. I. Stern (2016) Substitutability and the cost of climate mitigation policy, Environmental and Resource Economics. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Sanchez L. F. and D. I. Stern (2016) Drivers of industrial and non-industrial greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological Economics 124, 17-24. Working Paper Version | Blogpost 1 | Blogpost 2

Costanza R., R. B. Howarth, I. Kubiszewski, S. Liu, C. Ma, G. Plumecocq, and D. I. Stern (2016) Influential publications in ecological economics revisited, Ecological Economics. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Csereklyei Z., M. d. M. Rubio Varas, and D. I. Stern (2016) Energy and economic growth: The stylized facts, Energy Journal 37(2), 223-255. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Halkos G. E., D. I. Stern, and N. G. Tzeremes (2016) Population, economic growth and regional environmental inefficiency: Evidence from U.S. states, Journal of Cleaner Production 112(5), 4288-4295. Blogpost

PhD Applications Again

Three and a half years ago, I wrote a post about PhD applications. Since then, I have received a huge number of enquiries from prospective students. I now have two PhD students (Alrick Campbell and Panittra Ninpanit) and am on the committee/panel of two others (Anil Kavuri and Rohan Best). There are a couple of other good students who have applied but haven't come here because either their English test scores didn't meet our requirement or they couldn't get funding. We don't offer any new internal Crawford School scholarships at this point and I don't have any grant funds for PhD students. So, it is quite unlike applying for a PhD in the US where most students are funded by university sourced money in social sciences like economics. Here it is most likely that you will be funded by the Australian government one way or another, by your own government, or by an intergovernmental organization like the Asian Development Bank.*

As I mentioned in my previous post, also, unlike North America, applying to do a PhD in the social sciences and humanities here in Australia requires lining up a supervisor (=advisor) up front. Therefore, it is more like applying to do a PhD in the natural sciences and engineering in the US. Our formal process here also requires that potential students submit a research proposal, despite the fact that at ANU there is up to a year of coursework required in the economics program, which makes it seem more like a US PhD than most Australian PhD programs where you start doing research more or less straight away.

This is where I have been a bit frustrated by potential students submitting proposals that aren't at all related to the kind of research I do (despite this blog and my research webpage), proposals that are not very good, or being surprised that they need to submit a proposal because that isn't required to apply for a PhD in the US. Some of the latter seem like potentially good students. When I ask them for a proposal, the usual reaction is to write something rather quickly. I can't blame these students - when many programs around the world don't require a proposal, why should they invest a lot in writing one. One of the main reasons I did my PhD in the US rather than Britain was that I didn't know what to write a proposal about at the time. Another downside of a student submitting an upfront proposal is that they might then feel somewhat locked into that subject despite having written the proposal being a sunk cost. Alrick and Panittra were exceptions, having a pretty good proposal up front that was related to my research, which is why I agreed to supervise them.**

So, after receiving another off-the-wall topic from a prospective student this morning, I'm thinking of taking a radically new approach. Maybe, I should require students to submit a completed research paper (like we did when I was at RPI) instead of a  proposal for future research and then discuss this paper with the student to see how they think etc. I would require students to work on one of the broad areas I work on ("economic growth", "meta-analysis" etc.) and develop an actual proposal with them after they arrive here.

Or maybe the process is working exactly as it should? After all, I have had a few good applications and probably as many students as I should have. Any thoughts?

* Australian students can get an APA. Foreign students main option is the Australia Awards program. There are very few scholarships for students not from developing countries that Australia is interested in giving aid to. According to the government's Innovation Package, this will change dramatically.

** Students only need to line up the primary supervisor ahead of time. The other panel members usually join after the student has finished their coursework.

Donglan Zha

Donglan Zha is visiting Crawford School for the next year. She is an associate professor at Nanjing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics and works on energy economics including research on substitution possibilities and the rebound effect. Her office is in Constable's Cottage across the road from the main Crawford Building. Her ANU e-mail address is donglan.zha@anu.edu.au. Please welcome Donglan to the Crawford School, I'm sure she will be happy to meet with you.

Changes at ANU

Yesterday we heard the surprising news that Brian Schmidt would be the next vice-chancellor (president) of the ANU. Here at Crawford there is change too with the recent announcement that Tom Kompas would step down as School director after five years. We will be searching for a new school director and in the interim Bob Breunig will be acting director. That means that director of the International and Development Economics Program became vacant. I have agreed to be acting director of the program while Bob is directing the School (till 15 July 2016). There is more to the program that just the Masters of International and Development Economics. We also have a Masters of Environmental and Resource Economics. Effectively, though, it is the department of economics located at the Crawford Building. Crawford also has another department of economics - the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics - located in the Coombs Building. I was based there in 2009-2010. Other changes at Crawford is that Frank Jotzo is becoming deputy director of the School and John McCarthy is replacing him as READ director. I am leaving the READ group.

Telstra Internet

Back in 2010 I reported on the speed of the internet at home in Canberra and from my office on the ANU campus.

I just moved house and because service with iiNet was so bad and getting worse we switched to Telstra internet service. The speed is much, much higher:



The download speed is more than 8 times higher and the upload speed almost 4 times higher when accessing a server in Canberra. Accessing a server in San Jose, California:



downloading is more than 5 times faster and uploading 4 times faster.

Seminar @ Arndt-Corden 17 March

I am giving a seminar at Arndt-Corden on Tuesday 17th March at 2pm (Seminar Room B, Coombs Building, ANU) titled: "Directed Technical Change and the British Industrial Revolution". The abstract isn't entirely accurate any more - well specifically you won't see me talk about the last two sentences as we don't use a Monte Carlo analysis and we left the low elasticity of substitution for further research. We (myself, Jack Pezzey, and Yingying Lu) are close to having a paper that we are ready to put out as a working paper and submit to a journal. So, am looking forward to getting some useful comments to help us get there.

Arik Levinson Seminar 24 February at ANU

Arik Levinson will be presenting at the Arndt Corden Seminar at 2pm on 24th February (Seminar Room B in the Coombs Building). The Freakonomics Radio Show just did a podcast on the paper which he is going to be presenting.

Interested in Graduate Study at ANU?

Come along to the information evening next week at University House. At 6:30pm in the Common Room, Frank Jotzo, Amanda Smullen, Paul Burke, and Sue Thompson will talk about what you can study and why at the Crawford School.

New ANU Open Access Policy

ANU researchers are now required to submit all published research outputs to our institutional open access repository. Details of the policy are here. Material should be submitted here. Previously, this was on a voluntary basis. Holders of ARC grants would have needed to justify why outputs of their project were not available on an open access basis. As in economics we have a very strong working paper culture this seems unnecessary. But that isn't the case in other disciplines and I guess a one size fits all policy is easier to implement and enforce.

Ed Prescott to Speak at ANU

Ed Prescott (Nobel Laureate in Economics) will give the Trevor Swan Distinguished Lecture at ANU on 13th August. The lecture will be titled: Neoclassical Growth Theory: From Swan to Now. The blurb says:

"The Swan 1956 growth model is the cornerstone of secular growth theory. To broaden the model to encompass aggregate business cycle fluctuations Kydland and Prescott added an aggregate household to explain investment- savings and labor-leisure decisions. With this addition, neoclassical growth theory came into existence. Extensions of this theory have proven successful in the study of stock markets, growth miracles, prosperities and depressions, alternative tax policies, and differences in aggregate labor supply across countries and time. Deviations from the predictions of this theory are puzzles to be resolved and their resolutions have advanced neoclassical growth theory."

Unfortunately, I have to teach at that time, but I am hoping it will be recorded and some people will ask some good questions. Some of Prescott's work on growth is pretty fundamental to our current research on economic growth and economic history.

Unionization in Australian Universities

After seeing that Alison Booth's paper from the Quarterly Journal of Economics was the most downloaded paper from ResearchGate at Crawford this week, I was curious what fraction of employees at Australian universities belonged to the National Tertiary Education Union. Apparently NTEU has 26,000 members. It also seems that there are 113,000 employees in the university sector. On that basis the unionization rate would be only 23%. Of course, quite a lot of those are casuals or PhD students working as lecturer A etc.* But the total number of full-time staff is 86,000. That implies 30%. Also there were 67,933 staff on continuing contracts. If the latter is the real target market for the union then the rate is 38%. Based on this, social custom doesn't work well in the university sector to overcoming free-riding. Let me know if any of my assumptions are wrong as this is the first time I've ever looked at this issue.

* There were 41,730 academics at levels B and above, but the union also represents non-academic staff.

Chunbo Ma Seminar at ANU

Chunbo Ma will be visiting ANU from Monday for a couple of weeks to work with me on our ARC project. On 10th April he is giving a seminar on his research on the effect of solar panels on house prices. Chunbo was my PhD student in the US and we have published a few papers together. Our current work is on substitutability in China. Well, it is really more about using new estimators to estimate elasticities of substitution and we will use Chinese data to do that. Please register and come along to Chunbo's seminar if you are in Canberra.

On 1st April I am giving a seminar at Arndt-Corden Department of Economics. It will be a longer version of the presentation I gave at the AARES meeting in Port Macquarie in February and at the recent AARES evening in Canberra. I just heard that the same paper has been accepted to the World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economics in Istanbul. Please come along to this seminar too!

Upcoming Presentations

I am giving a presentation to the Canberra Branch of AARES. It is at 6:30pm on Wednesday 19th March on Level 3 at UniPub on University Ave/London Circuit in Civic. It is a rerun of my presentation at the AARES Conference at Port Macquarie last month though I have updated a couple of the slides. Also presenting are my post-doc Yingying Lu and my colleague Paul Burke who is a coauthor on the paper I am presenting, which is titled: "Rethinking the emissions-income relationship in terms of growth rates”. Paul is presenting "Reducing household dependence on biomass energy in developing countries" and Yingying is presenting “Substitutability and the cost of climate mitigation policy”. The event is free for AARES members and $10 for non-members.

On Tuesday 1 April at 2pm I will be presenting the same paper at the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics regular seminar series. The seminar is in Seminar Room B in the Coombs Building at ANU. This will be a longer presentation and so I will present some additional and newer results.

Call for Papers: Special Issue of AJARE on Commodity Booms

Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (AJARE)
Special issue on Resources and Energy Commodity Cycles: Maximising the Benefits of Resources and Energy Commodity Cycles

Focus
The Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (AJARE) is publishing a special issue on managing mining and energy commodity cycles for publication in 2015. Submissions are welcomed.

The economic effects of commodity cycles in mining and energy sectors are a major policy topic in resource-rich countries. This Special Issue will follow a previous special issue on Mining and Resource Economics in the journal in 2012, which has been very highly cited.  Submissions to the Special Issue should be focused on identifying and analysing economic drivers and impacts, as well as evaluating different policy mechanisms available to manage and ameliorate boom and bust cycles.

It is planned that the Special Issue will be released in print form in April 2015. It is anticipated that an associated Symposium or workshop on the topic will be held in Australia in early 2015 to engage policy makers in the research findings.

Timeline
·         Issue Call – March 2014
·         Submissions due – 15th of September 2014
·         Manuscript selection – 30th of September 2014
·         1st round Reviews Due – 15th of November 2014
·         Review process completed – 31st of January 2015
·         Early bird publications – 28th of February 2015
·         Issued in print form – April 2015

Sample topic areas
·         Resource rents and taxation
·         Sovereign wealth funds
·         State roles to achieve benefit maximisation
·         Labour force transformations in the mining sector
·         Indigenous and remote area employment
·         Productivity growth over a commodity cycle
·         Positive and negative spillovers to other sectors / technology / workforce issues
·         Impacts of price and investment boom on exchange rates, interest rates and other sectors
·         Managing the transitioning from the peaks of resources and energy booms
·         Historical overviews of past commodity cycles
·         Managing conflicts over land use and environmental tradeoffs
·         Providing infrastructure, housing and services to resource regions
·         Economics of energy efficiency
·         Measuring and predicting price and investment cycles
·         Stranded capital and resource assets
·         Sustainable mining
·         Resource extraction and environmental tradeoffs
·         Coal and gas market analysis
·         Economics and regulation of unconventional gas
·         Energy demand and supply analyses

Editors  
The special issue will be coordinated by Professor John Rolfe (Central Queensland University) and Professor Quentin Grafton (Australian National University), with additional support from the AJARE Editorial team. Further information about the Special Issue can be sourced from Professor John Rolfe (Email: j.rolfe@cqu.edu.au / Phone: 61 (7) 4923 2132).

Early advice about intentions to submit would be welcomed. This can be done by emailing a prospective title and abstract to Professor John Rolfe (j.rolfe@cqu.edu.au).

Submission
Guidelines for authors and the process to submit an article to AJARE. 

Countries Where Crawford Faculty Got Their PhDs

This is just for faculty at level C (senior lecturer) and above. We have a lot of post-docs and junior faculty with ANU PhDs. If we include them, half our faculty have Australian PhDs. We only have 7 faculty (10%) with PhDs from Australian universities other than ANU.

Australian Research Assessment Not Heading in UK Direction

That's the message I get from this interview with the head of the ARC, Aidan Byrne (formerly a science dean at ANU) in the Australian. The assumption of many in the sector, myself included is that the Australian research assessment exercise, ERA, and the funding attached to it would evolve in a way that generally followed UK practice with something of a time lag. In the UK, much more money is tied to the REF, the funding ratio associated with the three highest rankings of departments is 9:3:1, and case studies are being used very heavily to assess broader impact. Prof. Byrne argues that case studies should be used sparingly if at all to measure impact, not much money should be tied to ERA outcomes, and the funding ratio should be flatter. On Wednesday, I saw a presentation by Tim Cahill of the ARC on the ERA 2012 process and outcomes. One key finding was that for the citation based disciplines (most STEM disciplines (but not math or computer science) and psychology) there is a weak correlation between the ERA ranks assigned to universities and their citation performance relative to the benchmarks. A lot of subjectivity still seems to come into the ranking by the ERA committees. As they only count the number of citations per paper and not where they were cited, I guess that makes sense. So should Australian universities pay as much attention to ERA as they have been doing? For example, ANU has tied indicators in it strategic plan to the number of disciplines that achieve given ERA rankings by 2020. If I was the minister and looking for budget cuts would I want to continue with ERA on this basis?

Saltwater vs. Freshwater

An interesting new working paper tries to define whether economics departments are "saltwater" or "freshwater" based on citation networks. They find that the divide is strongest for macroeconomics and econometrics. This makes sense as this divide is about macroeconomics. So, this seems to be a real thing. It's amusing to see where non-US departments fall on the gradient. Looking at places I've studied or worked, ANU is saltwater and Hebrew University is freshwater, which is amusing (there isn't much water at all in Jerusalem and ANU is located next to a lake). LSE is very salty.  More widely, Tel Aviv U. is very freshwater and Cambridge is very saltwater. By comparison, ANU and Hebrew U. are brackish. So it doesn't have anything to do with the water really :)

Lake Burley Griffin - ANU Campus is at lower left

Monash-UMelb-ANU Economics Paper in Science

Paper by Lisa Cameron and Lata Gangadharan of Monash, Nisvan Erkal of U. Melbourne, and Xin Meng of ANU on the effects of the one child policy on social behavior in China. They used economic experiments and sophisticated econometrics to see the effects of the one-child policy on things like trust and risk-taking. This seems to be part of a trend to more regular articles in Science on social science topics.