Francqui Chair

I am one of the two recipients (one is Belgian and one international) of a Francqui Chair at Hasselt University. This sounds like an academic position but actually is a one year appointment during which the chair is supposed to give 10 hours of lectures in their field. I'm not sure yet what they are exactly looking for. But here are Siem Jan Koopman's planned lectures at the University of Antwerpen.

 

So, I'm thinking if I weave my research into a more pedagogical narrative I would be on the right track. I am hoping the lectures will be recorded and I will be able to post them here on Stochastic Trend. My coathors Stephan Bruns and Robert Malina nominated me for this award.

I am hoping I will actually be able to visit Belgium next year assuming that I will be able to access a COVID-19 vaccine.

Abandoning a Paper

Now and then it's time to give up on a project. In September 2018, I attended a climate econometrics conference at Frascati near Rome. For my presentation, I did some research on the performance of different econometric estimators of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) including the multicointegrating vector autoregression (MVAR) that we used in our paper in the Journal of Econometrics. The paper included estimates using historical time series observations (from 1850 to 2014), a Monte Carlo analysis, estimates using output of 16 Global Circulation Models (GCMs), and a meta-analysis of the GCM results.

The historical results, which are mostly also in the Journal of Econometrics paper, appear to show that taking energy balance into account increases the estimated climate sensitivity. By energy balance, we mean that if there is disequilibrium between radiative forcing and surface temperature the ocean must be heating or cooling. Surface temperature is in equilibrium with ocean heat, and in fact follows ocean heat much more closely than it follows radiative forcing. Not taking this into account results in omitted variables bias. Multicointegrating estimators model this flow and stock equilibirum. The residuals from a cointegrating relationship between the temperature and radiative forcing flows are accumulated into a heat stock, which in turn cointegrates with surface temperature. If we have actual observations on ocean heat content or radiative imbalances we can use them. But available time series are much shorter than those for surface temperature or radiative forcing. The results also suggested that using a longer time series increases the estimated climate sensitivity.

The Monte Carlo analysis was supposed to investigate these hypotheses more formally. I used the estimated MVAR as the model of the climate system and simulated the radiative forcing series as a random walk. I made 2000 different random walks and estimated the climate sensitivity with each of the estimators. This showed that, not surprisingly, the MVAR was an unbiased estimator. The other estimators were biased using a random walk of just 165 periods. But when I used a 1000 year series all estimators were unbiased. In other words, they were all consistent estimators of the ECS. This makes sense, because in the end equilibrium is reached between forcing and surface temperature. But it takes a long time.

Each of the GCMs I used has an estimated ECS ("reported ECS") from an experiment where carbon dioxide is suddenly increased fourfold. I was using data from a historical simulation of each GCM, which uses the estimated historical forcings over the period 1850 to 2014. A major problem in this analysis is that the modelling teams do not report the forcing that they used. This is because the global forcing that results from applying aerosols etc depends on the model and the simulation run. So, I used the same forcing series that we used to estimate our historical models. This isn't unprecedented, Marvel et al. (2018) do the same.

In general, the estimated ECS were biased down relative to the reported ECS for the GCMs, but again, the estimators that took energy balance into account seemed to do better. In an meta-analysis of the results, I compared how much the reported radiative imbalance (=ocean heat uptake roughly) from each GCM increased to how much the energy balance equation said it should increase using the reported temperature series, reported ECS, and my radiative forcing series. A regression analysis showed, that where the two matched, the estimators that took energy balance into account were unbiased, while those that did not match, under-estimated the ECS.

These results seemed pretty nice and I submitted the paper for publication. Earlier this year, I got a revise and resubmit. But when I finally got around to working on the paper post-lockdown and post-teaching things began to fall apart.

First, I came across the Forster method of estimating the radiative forcing in GCMs. This uses the energy balance equation:

where F is radiative forcing, T is surface temperature, and N is radiative imbalance. Lambda is the feedback parameter. ECS is inversely proportional to it. The deltas indicate the change since some baseline period. Then, if we know N and T, both of which are provided in GCM results, we can find F! So, I used this to get the forcing specific to each GCM. The results actually looked nicer than in the originally submitted paper. These are the results for the MVAR for 15 CMIP5 GCMs:

The rising line is a 45 degree line, which marks equality between reported and estimated ECSs. The multicointegrating estimators were still better than the other estimators. But there wasn't any systematic variation in the degree of underestimation that would allow us to use a meta-analysis to derive an adjusted estimate of the ECS.

This is still OK. But then I read and re-read more research on under-estimation of the ECS from historical observations. The recent consensus is that estimates from recent historical data will inevitably under-estimate the ECS because feedbacks change from the early stages after an increase in forcing to the latter stages as a new equilibrium is reached. The effective climate sensitivity is lower at first and greater later.

OK, even if we have to give up on estimating the long-run ECS, my estimates are estimates of the historical sensitivity. Aren't they? The problem is that I used the long-run ECS to derive the forcing from the energy balance equation. So, the forcing I derived is wrong. It is too low. I could go back to using the forcing I used previously, I guess. But now I don't believe the meta-analysis of that data is meaningful. So, I have a bunch of estimates using the wrong forcing with no way to further analyse them.

I also revisited the Monte Carlo analysis. By the way I had an on-and-off again coauthor through this research. He helped me a lot with understanding how to analyse the data. But he didn't like my overly bullish conclusions on the submitted paper and so withdrew his name from it. But he was maybe going to get back on the revised submission. He thought that the existing analysis which used an MVAR to produce the simulated data was maybe biased unfairly in favour of the MVAR. So, I came up with a new data-generating process. Instead of starting with a forcing series I would start with the heat content series. From that I would derive temperature, which needs to be in equilibrium with heat content and then using the energy balance equation derive the forcing. To model the heat content I fitted a unit root autoregressive model (stochastic trend) to the heat content reported from the Community GCM with the addition of a volcanic forcing explanatory variable. The stochastic trend represents anthropogenic forcing. The Community GCM is one of the 15 GCMs I was using and it has temperature and heat content series that look a lot like the observations. I then fitted a stationary autoregressive model for temperature with the addition of the heat content as an explanatory variable. The simulated model used normally distributed shocks with the same variance as these fitted models and volcanic shocks.

As an aside, the volcanic shocks were produced by the model:

where rangamma(0.05) are random numbers drawn from a standard gamma distribution with shape parameter 0.05. This is supposed to produce the stratospheric sulfur radiative forcing, which decays over a few years following an eruption. Here is an example realisation:

The dotted line is historical volcanic forcing and the solid line a simulated forcing. My coauthor said it looked "awesome".

So, again, I produced two sets of 2000 datasets. One with a sample size of 165 and one with a sample size of 1000. Now, even in the smaller sample, all four estimators I was testing produced essentially identical and unbiased results! I ran this yesterday. So, our Monte Carlo result disappears. I can't see anything unreasonable about this data generating process, which produces completely different results to the one in the submitted paper. So, I don't see anything to justify one over the other. So, this was the point where I gave up on this project.

My coauthor, who is based in Europe, is on vacation. Maybe he'll see a way to save it when he comes back, but I am sceptical.

Interview with Western Cycles Blog

Alejandro Puerto is a 20 year old who lives in Cuba. He has written: "Western Cycles: United Kingdom" a book that covers the economic and political history of the UK from 1945 onwards. He maintains a website of the same name that showcases his writing. You can also follow him on Twitter. He asked me whether I would I would do an interview for his blog. Here it is:

When did you became interested in the energy and the environment on economics?

I was interested in the environment from an early age and so I studied geography, biology (and chemistry) in the last 2 years of high school in England (1981-3) and then went on to study geography at university (in Israel). I had to pick another field and initially chose business as something practical but quickly switched to economics. I then realised that economics could explain a lot of geography and environmental trends. It was only when I went to do my PhD starting in 1990 that the faculty at Boston University at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies which was linked to the Geography Department there were really focused on the role of energy in the economy and environmental trends that I became interested in understanding the role of energy. So I got a PhD in geography officially but had quite a lot of economics training and over time drifted closer to economics, so now I am even director of the economics program at the Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU.

I think that my generation is more informed on climate change because of the work of people like you. Do you think the same? Describe us some of your research.

Well, I think it has just become a much bigger and obvious issue as the global temperature has increased. The awareness of what is happening has been driven by people in the natural sciences. I have done some research applying time series models used in macroeconomics to modelling the climate system and though our first paper was published in Nature in 1997 and we have been cited on that in IPCC reports it has largely been on the fringes of climate science. My view of that research is that it takes an entirely different approach to modelling the system than most climate scientists use (mostly they use big simulation models called GCMs) and finds similar results which strengthens their conclusions. Most of my research has been on the role of energy in economic growth and the effect of economic growth on emissions and concentrations of pollutants. The effect of energy on growth is much more complicated than many people think – it seems that energy is more important as growth driver in the past in the developed world – adding energy when you have little has more effect than when you already have a lot. On pollution I’ve argued that the idea of the environmental Kuznets curve – that as countries get richer eventually growth will actually be good for the environment and reduce pollution is either outright wrong or too simplified. Instead in fast growing countries like China, growth overwhelms efforts to reduce pollution, while in slower growing developed economies clean up can happen faster than growth.

The Paris Summit filled your expectations as an environmental economist?

It was probably better than expected give the lack of success in getting agreement before then. Countries pledges are too little to reach the goal of limiting warming to 2C and we will probably have to remove carbon from the atmosphere in a big way later in this Century. The real question is whether countries will actually fulfil their voluntary pledges. OTOH low-carbon technology is developing fast and that is a positive that is making achieving the goals looking more possible.

How dangerous would be the environmental policy of the United States under the Trump administration on climate change?

It will delay action, unclear how much effect it will really have. Encouraging the development of new technology is important and having the largest and leading economy not focused on that is a negative. The US can’t actually leave till late 2020 and Trump has left the door open to submitting a weaker INDC in the interim and claiming victory. The US will still be involved in UNFCCC talks etc.

What do you think about the emissions of developing countries as they become industrious?

Developing country emissions are now larger than developed country emissions. But there is a big difference between China which now has higher per capita emissions than the European Union and say India which has still very low per capita emissions. China needs to take action and has made a moderately strong pledge. We should expect much less from India say. India is, though, strongly encouraging renewables development. Hopefully, technology is advancing fast enough that the poorest countries will end up going down a lower carbon path anyway as fossil fuel technologies gradually phase out.

Since 2006 China has become the greatest global polluter and emissions still growing continuously. China has no plans for decrease these emissions until 2030. What do you think about the attitude of this country?

They say they will peak emissions by 2030. In terms of reduction in emissions intensity per dollar of GDP their goal is quite strong. In the last 3 years Chinese CO2 emissions have been constant. Some argue they are already peaking now. I am a bit more skeptical. We need to see a few more years. There are several reasons why China is pursuing a fairly strong climate policy including energy security, encouraging innovation and reducing local air pollution as well as realising that they can benefit a lot from reducing their own emissions because they are such a large part of the problem.

In the long term, which kind of renewable energy would be the first to think about? Solar? Wind?

Solar – it has a greater potential total resource and looks like eventually prices will be below wind. Wind of course is strong in places without much sunshine like the Atlantic Ocean off NW Europe. I’m concerned though about the environmental impact of lots of wind power. In the long-run I’m still hoping for fusion to work out :)

Tell us about one of your favorite posts published by you on Stochastic Trend.

I’ve done less blogging recently as I now use Twitter for short things. Most of the posts are excerpts from papers or discussions of new papers. The most popular blogpost this year with visitors is:

http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com.au/2017/03/from-wood-to-coal-directed-technical.html

Where I discuss our working paper on the role of coal in the Industrial Revolution. The research and writing of this paper took a very long time and I was really happy to be able to announce to the world that it was ready.

Do you drive an electric car?

No, I don’t have a driving licence. My wife drives and we have a car but it is a large petrol-engined car that is not very efficient. We don’t drive it much though. We’ve driven less than 30,000 km since buying it in 2007.

Have you ever visited Cuba? Are you interested? There are a lot of 1950s cars, but there are places with tropical nature.

No, I haven’t been to Cuba. The only place I’ve been in Latin America is Tijuana, Mexico. I’m not travelling that much recently as we now have a 1 1/2 year old child. But Cuba probably wouldn’t be high on my agenda. I travel mostly to either visit family or go to academic conferences and work with other researchers. The only time I flew somewhere outside the country I was living in just to go on vacation was when I flew from Ethiopia to Kenya. I was at an IPCC meeting in Ethiopia.

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

Stochastic Trend Included in Top 100 Economics Blogs!

I'm honored that Stochastic Trend has made it into a list of the top 100 economics blogs, albeit at position 99. It's a good list of possible blogs to follow.

P.S. 18 December 2016

Also see this list.

Family Portrait

This will slow things down for a while :) Noah was born two days ago. He is a very large baby - 4.71kg and 55cm long. If he was a t-statistic, he'd have 2 or 3 stars. He'll have to make do with one, his surname.*

* Stern = Star in German.

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.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve after 25 Years

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the working paper: "Environmental Impacts of a North American Free Trade Agreement" by Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger, which launched the environmental Kuznets curve industry. I have a new working paper out whose title capitalizes on this milestone. This is my contribution to the special issue of the Journal of Bioeconomics based on the workshop at Griffith University that I attended in October. It's a mix between a survey of the literature and a summary of my recent research with various coauthors on the topic.

Despite the pretty pictures of the EKC in many economics textbooks, there isn't a lot of evidence for an inverted U-shape curve when you look at a cross-section of global data:

Carbon emissions from energy use and cement production and sulfur dioxide emissions both seem to be monotonically increasing in income per capita. Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land-clearing (AFOLU, lower left) or particulate concentrations (bottom right) just seem to be amorphous clouds. In fact, we do find an EKC with an in sample income turning point for PM 2.5 pollution, but only when we look at changes over time in individual countries. Interestingly, Grossman and Krueger originally applied the EKC to ambient concentrations of pollutants and it is there that it seems to work best.

The paper promotes our new "growth rates" approach to modeling emissions. Here are graphs of the growth rates of pollution and income per capita that exactly match the traditional EKC graphs above:



There is a general tendency for declining economies to have mostly declining pollution and vice versa, though this effect is strongest for energy-related carbon emissions. The graphs for sulfur and AFOLU GHG emissions are both shifted down by comparison. There is a general tendency unrelated to growth for these pollutants to decline over time - a negative "time effect". Growth has a positive effect though on all three. PM 2.5 (lower right) is a different story. Here economic growth eventually brings down pollution. We don't find a significant negative time effect.

I first got interested in the EKC in November 1993 when I was sitting in Mick Common's office at the University of York where I'd recently started as a post-doc (though I was still working on my PhD). He literally drew the EKC on the back of an envelope and asked whether more growth would really improve the environment even if the EKC was true. I did the basic analysis really quickly but then it took us another couple of years to get the paper published in World Development.

Google Scholar Matures

Since it was introduced in late 2004, Google Scholar has rapidly grown to become a widely used tool for finding and assessing the impact of academic literature. The database still suffers from noise relative to its competitors Scopus and Web of Science but it has broader coverage, especially in the social sciences and humanities and is open access. As the database developed, Google have periodically added new information sources to the database. This resulted in a rapid growth in estimated citations of articles in the early years. However, it now seems that the database has matured. The following graph shows the growth rate of citations to my research in the previous 12 months, measured monthly since 2009 for Google Scholar in blue and a bit more intermittently for Scopus in red. I have also fitted exponential trend lines to the two series:

Initially the growth rate of Google Scholar citations was very high and very erratic. But the month to month variation in the annual growth rate has reduced drastically over time. By contrast, the growth rate of Scopus citations has been much more consistent, with a slow rate of decline in the percentage growth rate over time. Interestingly, the two series have also converged to a common growth rate of 17-18% per year. So, it seems that Google's database is now as mature as Scopus is. This doesn't mean that Google is now as high a quality data source as Scopus is. It isn't. But large revisions to citation counts or additions of large new data sources seems to be a thing of the past.

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.

Environment and Development Economics is 20 Years Old

And there is a special issue to celebrate. You can find the introductory article from the editors here. One of my tasks as a post-doc at University of York was helping my boss, Charles Perrings, with the administrative tasks for the new journal like sending invitation letters to the editorial board members. It's also 20 years since I got my PhD - my defence was in April 1994 - I started the post-doc at York as an "ABD" in September 1993. Time flies!

Right now I'm at the IAEE meeting in New York City, will be going on to the Atlantic Workshop in Spain next week and the World Congresss of Environmental and Resource Economics in Istanbul the following week. Not surprisingly, the main talk here is about shale oil and gas and their implications. Flying over Pennsylvania on Sunday I saw quite a few drilling sites...

EROI Goes Mainstream

Back in 1990-91 when I started my PhD I was introduced to esoteric ideas like Energy Return on Investment and Peak Oil in classes given by Cutler Cleveland and Robert Kaufmann. Nowadays, these ideas are showing up in humorous videos on YouTube.

Checking In

I haven't been blogging much lately - things have been very busy (started teaching, trips etc.) so I haven't had time to blog on papers I have read, policy issues and the like and several projects are near completion but not quite there and so I neither have anything to report on them nor any preliminary literature review etc. I can put up as blogposts. That pretty much covers the sources of content for this blog. This should change over the next month or so as some of these projects are finalized.

There is a little news to report. My paper on "Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylized Facts" (one of the almost complete papers) was accepted for the IAEE conference in New York City. So, I expect I will go to that meeting in mid-June. We got another revise and resubmit on the traditional and modern energy paper. Another, because we already had an R&R from another journal that then rejected our revised version. The AARES conference this month was a lot of fun. It looks like some of the papers will be re-presented here in Canberra for AARES members that couldn't make it to the conference. I'll let you know when my paper is scheduled. I also will present a paper on the same topic (emissions and growth) as a seminar at the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics here at ANU on 1 April. Maybe there is a reason why that date was still free :)

Last Thursday and Friday I had a research meeting with Jack Pezzey and Astrid Kander. We discussed our work on modelling the Industrial Revolution. I think we have a viable strategy for overcoming this setback. Location: Coogee Beach. Astrid has been visiting Sydney for this month working with researchers at the University of New South Wales and so Coogee was the perfect place for her to stay. Certainly, a great place for a meeting :)

Scooped

This is how I feel today:

The positives are that: I'm not a PhD student, we won't waste time on doing the research, and it must have been a good idea (unfortunately an obvious one for those who know the various literatures). Well, I had better read the (working) paper in detail and see if we still have an angle. If we have an angle all will be revealed in due course.

Crawford School Rolls Out New Academic Profiles

The reason many academics start their own websites is the usually very slow pace at which profiles on official university websites are updated. Often a web profile will list publications from 2009 as being "in press" or worse. A simple solution is to allow academics to update their own pages. In the past this would have resulted in very unpretty website full of all kinds of strange edits. But now content management systems allow users to make changes to content without being able to damage the overall look. Well, that's the theory, anyway. Today, the Crawford School rolled out new academic profiles that each individual academic can edit using the Drupal content management system. I've already updated my publication list so that my PLOS ONE paper is no longer listed as "in press" two years on.

Update...

I haven't blogged much recently as things have been very busy, teaching, admin, service (reviewing things), and lots of research projects in progress  - 5 papers in review or under revision and at least 12 at various stages from basic research to near completed - almost all my current papers now involve coauthorship. This is also the time of the semester when we also start preparing for the next semester's teaching. I'll be teaching my energy economics course for the second time. And I have been planning my travel over the winter break. First, I am going to Guelph to the workshop on econometric applications in climatology. It's all planned and they've posted my paper. I just need to write a presentation and go. Though I've been to Canada, all my visits so far have been to Quebec. I'll also visit a friend in Virginia. I'll be back here just in time for my students' exam and essay grading. Then I'll be off on another trip that will include Addis Ababa, where the 4th Lead Author meeting of the IPCC Working Group 3 will be held. It's in Addis because one of the co-chairs of the working group is from Ethiopia. Another is from Cuba. That would have been interesting too, but I suppose that no Americans would go to the meeting, which would kind of be a problem... I'll go to some other places too, which maybe I'll report on when I get back :)

Southerners are "American" while Northerners are "German"

I know I have seen this image and data before (in a book we got for free at a geography conference) but I ">just saw it again and now the connections to US politics sprung into my mind. Southerners tend to see themselves as either as unhyphenated Americans or Black. In the north, relatively few people see themselves as just American and instead remember their ethnic ancestry and are proud of it. The largest ancestry is German though the English were the "charter group" and hence the United States speaks English rather than German.

In a past academic life :) I taught cultural geography and researched ethnic distribution in cities....

It seems that the core "red states" area is also the area where people identify as American most. Well, this isn't quite true:



but I think interesting all the same.

Public Lecture by Bob Costanza at the Crawford School

Bob Costanza is visiting the Crawford School at ANU and giving a public lecture:

‘Ecosystem services come of age: Linking science, policy, and participation for sustainable human well-­being’
Tuesday 15 May 2012
5:00pm - 6:00pm
Weston Theatre, JG Crawford Building 132, Lennox Crossing, ANU

More details and RSVP here.

Costanza is University Professor of Sustainability in the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University. He is also editor-in-chief and co-founder of the new journal Solutions. Bob was the founding president of the International Society for Ecological Economics and founding editor of Ecological Economics. He has a very impressive record of high impact publications.

On a personal note, my PhD advisor, Cutler Cleveland studied for his masters degree with Bob at Louisiana State University. Bob was also my wife, Shuang's PhD adviser. And I coauthored a paper with Bob in 2004. I often think that ecological economists should have "Costanza numbers" like the well-known Erdös numbers :)

Hub Project Almost Wrapped Up

The main paper from my Environmental Economics Research Hub project has just been accepted for publication in Energy Economics. It is titled: "Modeling international trends in energy efficiency and carbon emissions". This is really the background paper behind the paper that Frank Jotzo and I published in Energy Policy in 2010. In that paper we applied this model to assessing climate policy in India and China. This paper goes into much more detail about the factors related to differences in energy efficiency across countries and the trends across the world in energy efficiency over time and whether countries are converging in energy efficiency or not globally (mostly converging if they are growing). I also do a decomposition of global energy use and carbon emissions and provide much more detail on the methods which are a bit innovative on both the theory and econometrics side. As you can tell there is a lot in the paper. There was even more in my original report. I already trimmed that report before submitting it and after refereeing I cut the choice theory model out and slimmed stuff down even more.

My Hub project was funded by the Environmental Economics Research Hub for a year from March 2009 to March 2010 during which I was a researcher in the Arndt Corden Department of Economics at ANU. So it has taken almost two years to go from working paper to acceptance and will be more time until publication. The third paper that emerged from the project was between estimates of the environmental Kuznets curve, which was published in Ecological Economics eventually.

The Hub itself was a research network involving ANU and other Australian universities funded under the CERF scheme that funded research in various environmental areas.

Wayback in 1997

My homepage from the relatively early days of the World Wide Web. A lot of the links do work. My first web page would have been in 1995 but that is no longer accessible. The current version is here. You'll notice that this page has something in common with the 1997 homepage.