Elsevier Article Usage Dashboards and Tips for Early Career Researchers

The new article usage dashboards are a nice feature of Elsevier journals. Here is the dashboard for my 2013 article in Energy Economics:

It's interesting to see where our paper is being downloaded. China is in the lead. Obviously there are a lot of downloads in Sweden and Australia as the authors are Swedish and Australian and the data is Swedish. Also, there are a lot of downloads in Turkey, which has a lot of researchers in energy economics.

There is also a link in the Dashboard to a page with lots of useful guides for early career researchers. Some of the advice will also be useful for more senior researchers looking to get greater impact from their publications.

RATS Command RESTRICT

I've spent the last couple of days trying to replicate results in RATS that Chunbo produced using STATA. In the process we found a lot of bugs in our data-processing and computer codes but now we can replicate each others results. We are estimating a translog cost share system together with the cost function. Previously, I have used the RATS command SUR to estimate a system of seemingly unrelated regressions and then the command RESTRICT(replace) to impose the restrictions and SUR(CREATE) to produce the restricted SUR estimates. This did not reproduce the same results as STATA at all. Instead using NLSYSTEM in RATS (despite the fact that the system is linear), I managed to reproduce the same results as STATA. This now seems to be the recommended way to do this type of analysis according to the RATS User Guide. So, I really don't know what the estimates produced by RESTRICT in RATS represent and I strongly recommend not to use them. This shows yet again that it is very important to know what the computer code you are using is actually doing.

Working in Policy and Working in Academic Research

Interesting blogpost on the differences. These are of course the extreme poles between someone doing solo-authored work in economic theory and someone work hands on in government or international policy. Academic research in economics is increasingly done in teams. Most of my ongoing projects are coauthored at the moment. Despite Deirdre McCloskey's criticisms, we are also very interested in the magnitude of effects - for example the size of the rebound effect or the climate sensitivity. And if you want to get a grant (at least in Australia) you have to convince academics outside your discipline. If you want to have a policy influence you have to convince non-academics. As someone at a school of public policy that is an important part of our mission. I also prefer to answer important questions even if it is hard to give a good answer to them, rather than less important questions which can be answered better. Of course, if we can't say anything novel enough to publish we have to drop the topic. There is a "sweet spot" where the question is both important and can be answered well, but that is difficult to find.

Economics Blog Aggregator: econacademics.org

Economists who are blogging about economics research can ask to have their blog included in Econacademics.org. Then, any post that refers to an abstract page on RePEc will automatically be included in the list of blogposts. It's a useful resource on the latest economics research or a way to find new blogs you might be interested in following.

Penn World Table 8.0

The new version of the Penn World Table - version 8.0 - has recently been made available and is now hosted at University of Groningen in the Netherlands. An NBER working paper by Feenstra et al. describes what is new in PWT 8.0.

The new edition of the dataset introduces several new measures of GDP and the working paper is mostly devoted to discussing them as well as the relationship between PPP exchange rates (relative to market exchange rates) and the level of income known as the Penn or Balassa-Samuelson Effect.

GDP is now given both in terms of the output side and the expenditure side. The difference between these is that real output side GDP (RGDP(O)) deflates expenditure on final goods (the standard macro-economic C+I+G - consumption, investment, and government expenditure), exports (X), and imports (M) using separate deflators:

The expenditure side real GDP (RGDP(E)) uses only the final output deflator to deflate the GDP. Feenstra et al. argue that the former expresses better the real production level in each country and the latter the standard of living in each country. Previous versions of the Penn World Table used the expenditure side measure only. The difference between the two measures is due to the terms of trade. Countries with relatively expensive exports and relatively cheap imports will have living standards (RGDP(E)) that are higher than their real productive capacity (RGDP(O)).

GDP is also given in "current" and "constant" prices. This terminology is confusing because usually current prices mean prices not adjusted for inflation and constant prices mean adjusted for inflation. Here constant prices mean the reference prices from a given benchmark year -  in the current version 2005 - and current prices mean using the reference prices from each year though these are adjusted for US inflation. These differ because the reference prices change over time. The constant price series RGDP are better for comparisons across time while the current price series CGDP can be used to compare countries at a single point in time.

Finally, there is also an RGDP(NA) series that uses the growth rates in each country's own national accounts to extrapolate GDP in that country in years other than the benchmark year. National accounts growth rates were used exclusively in previous versions of the Penn World Table. This series can differ substantially from the RGDP(E) series as is shown by this graph for India:

According to RGDP(E) living standards in India fell from 1975 to 1985 while according to India's own national accounts they rose. Which is right? Well, it depends what you want to measure. The change in RGDP(E) measures the change in relative living standards across countries while that in RGDP(NA) measures the change in real expenditure weighted according to the budget shares in the country in question. They differ because budget shares differ across countries. RGDP(E) will also grow faster than RGDP(NA) in a country experiencing an improvement in the terms of trade as, for example, Australia did in the years up to 2009 due to the mining boom.

PWT 8.0 also includes capital stock, human capital, and total factor productivity series. The former was included for some countries in some previous versions but not version 7. The latter are both new.

So, all this sounds more complicated than using The Economist's Big Mac Index or previous versions of the PWT. The User Guide gives a less technical guide on how to use the data.

Elsevier Journal Finder

A new tool from Elsevier gives you information on suitable journals for your paper, but more importantly average times to first editorial decision and acceptance rates. You just need to type in your paper title and paste your abstract. Times from acceptance to publication online seem to be over-estimated relative to current practice at Elsevier. The finder did pick the correct journal for my most recently published paper, though the alternatives were a bit odd. I would have expected Energy Policy to be the second choice, but it wasn't even on the list.

Stern and Enflo, Energy Economics

My paper with Kerstin Enflo: "Causality between energy and output in the long-run" has been accepted to be published in Energy Economics. In this case, the published paper will only differ slightly from the working paper version, which I have already blogged about. This is mainly because we only put up the working paper after getting a revise and resubmit from the journal. The question of when to post a working paper is something I have discussed on the blog and thought about quite a bit. We just got a revise and resubmit on this working paper. Our plan, is to add some additional analysis to answer the referees concerns. Even if we end up updating the database the final paper will not be radically different. There are other cases where we completely changed the dataset in response to referee comments. So, in that case, our first working paper was a bit premature.

Grad Student Classification

I guess this can apply to post-docs and assistant professors too :)

Information for Prospective PhD Students

In the US, a proposal is not a requirement for applying to do a PhD. Usually, students do one to two years of coursework before writing their proposal and it is enough to confirm that a department has faculty specializing in the general area that a student is interested in, say energy economics or climate change in my case. But, here in Australia, we expect students to submit a detailed proposal, even though in practice this proposal will be extensively revised after they start study. And in our economics program there is a year of coursework before students switch to research only. It makes sense to me for a student to select an area of interest to the potential supervisor and then discuss with the supervisor how to develop the proposal. Of course, a student might have a burning issue that they can't wait to conduct research on. But I doubt there are really many such cases. I certainly didn't know what I wanted to research. This was one of the main reasons I went to study in the US rather than remain in the UK. In the UK I would have needed to submit a proposal with my application.

Jack Pezzey has some good guidelines to help potential PhD students think about the application process in Australia. He recommends developing the proposal in consultation with him. He also has a great summary of his current research interests. That was meant to be one of the purposes of this blog. I used to have a research page on my website. But I scrapped that when I started this blog. I've decided it's time to put up a research page again. I hope this will be useful to give potential PhD students and collaborators an idea of what I am currently working on or would be interested in working.

Some previous thoughts on PhD applications.

Being on the Cutting Edge

I was just reading another essay by Paul Graham, which I thought was worth linking. A lot of this is true for academic research too. The best way to get lots of good research ideas is to put yourself at the cutting edge. Doing research on any idea you have should lead to more ideas. Having a prepared mind is important. Studying and doing research prepares your mind. A short-cut is to put yourself in an environment where there are people at the cutting edge. This is why it is important to go to a good place to do graduate study etc. Going to conferences and seminars even not in what you think is your area. Something a lot of grad students don't do, but the successful ones do.

Eventually, you'll find you have so many ideas you have to pick and choose and prioritize between them. Having ideas will no longer be the problem, bringing them to fruition will be. That's when you'll start getting other people to work on them for you :)

ORCID is Now Open for Registration

I wrote about ORCID - a global system of free unique researcher IDs - more than a year ago. You can finally now register for ORCID and I just signed up and linked my data from my Scopus profile. Actually, it was Scopus' home page that alerted me to the possibility of getting an ORCID ID. Hopefully, this will really take off and allow the easy identification of researchers and their track records. Especially, those with common names like S. Liu or D. Stern.*

* D. I. Stern is a unique academic name but not all my publications or citations have both initials and David and Daniel Stern are very common names. This non-academic David I. Stern is pretty prominent too and I did find one David Ian Stern in Texas.

When to Put Out a Working Paper?

In the past I usually put out a working paper version of my research at the same time as submitting the paper to a journal. I assumed that if I thought the paper was ready to be refereed then it was ready to be read by a broader audience too. When I was looking for a job I thought that it was important to get stuff onto my CV as fast as possible. I still usually sent papers, and especially single authored papers, to colleagues for comment before getting to this stage. But some discussions with colleagues, reading blogs, and noting the that some working papers are in fact more or less identical to the published version has made rethink this practice.

Some colleagues reported that they either waited for the first round of comments from a journal before putting up a working paper or that they waited for final acceptance at a journal.

So recently, I have been following a mix of these two strategies, which is one reason why I haven't put up many working papers recently. But I'm still not sure what the best strategy should be.

PhD Applications

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. If you don't have a supervisor who is interested we won't take you on as a PhD student. This is despite the fact that at ANU there is significant coursework required in the economics programs, which makes it seem more like a US PhD.* There are some useful tips for PhD applications in this blog post, though this seems a bit too much for an initial approach. I don't need Powerpoint slides, for example. But I do want a CV and grades can be useful too. If you just send an e-mail with no CV I will have to ask you right away for a CV, unless it is really obvious from your letter that you are not suitable. At Crawford, we have an "Expression of Interest" process that tells prospective students what information we need. This is kind of an informal application process (without an application fee), which allows us to assess whether there is a supervisor interested in supervising you and whether you have a chance to be accepted or get funding etc. You can just approach a supervisor directly too, but this gives an idea of the information we are going to need.

Personally, at this stage, I'm only interested in taking on students who are really good, well prepared, and interested in working in an area closely related to my current and future research interests. My recent working papers and this blog can give you an idea about what those are. This is going to result in the best experience for the student in launching a career. A student working on something only vaguely related to what I do is going to get a lot less useful input from me, beyond basic tips on how to do research, and is going to have to be very self-motivated. I won't be helpful in putting them in touch with important people in the field etc.

If you have different skills to me though - for example, you are familiar with some modeling or math techniques other than econometrics - that could be good as we could complement each other.

* I can supervise students in either our economics or our environment programs.

How to Write Economics Papers

Back in 2010 I blogged on John Cochrane's writing tips. Here are the slides from Daniel Hamermesh's presentation on how to publish in a good journal. A lot of it is about how to write papers rather than specifically about getting into good journals. His advice is a bit more traditional than Cochrane's, I think. You can see the full presentation on YouTube.

Be Known by the Company You Keep: Citations - Quality or Chance?

I previously blogged about how highly downloaded working papers lead to higher downloads of other papers in the same series. So I was interested to read that having your paper appear in the same issue of a journal as a highly cited article increases your number of citations. The implication is that weak papers can benefit from being in journals with high impact factors. Another interesting point in this paper is that self-citations help increase citations to a paper. I've suspected that this is true. Advertising your paper by citing it gets more people to be aware of it. But we can't really establish causality here. Maybe better authors just tend to cite themselves more and/or get more opportunities to do so.

Interview with Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics

The QJE is currently widely regarded as the top economics journal. It is also well-known for leading the trend towards "desk-rejections", where papers are rejected by the editors without sending them to external referees. This greatly speeds up the process for papers that are obviously not likely to pass the refereeing process. One of my roles at Ecological Economics as associate editor is giving advice about whether to desk reject papers and I think we are desk rejecting more over time.

I found this interview with the editor of the QJE that I thought had some useful tips about submitting papers to top journals. At Ecological Economics, sloppiness won't be an automatic desk reject if the paper looks interesting. We are more likely to throw out papers because the basic thesis makes no sense or the authors do not justify at all what they do. But really bad English that hinders understanding will result in a desk reject too. Unless your English is close to native speaker standard it is worth getting a native English speaker to look over your paper before submission whether for free or for a fee.

SHERPA/RoMEO

In economics there is a very strong tradition of working papers and journals do not have a problem with a working paper version of the paper (a "preprint") already having been "published". But this can be a real problem in some other disciplines. Putting up a working paper on the web could preclude publication in a refereed journal. Usually, in biology you can assume that a preprint is not OK. For interdisciplinary researchers working out what they are allowed to do in this regard could be a real problem. Fortunately, there is a really useful website called SHERPA/RoMEO that lists journal's policies on preprints and posting of final versions of papers. Information is missing on some journals, but it does provide a huge amount of information on most.

Becoming a Researcher

A great post on becoming a researcher. Well, it's actually titled: "How to find problems to work on", which is something I have found sometimes puzzles non-academics. I don't have 55 things I am working on but I do have a list with about twenty things on it which are papers from very sketchy ideas to papers under review. Probably, a smaller number of things makes sense in economics than in paleontology. Most economists publish less papers. How many things are in your list?

Daron Acemoglu on Publishing

Advice from Daron Acemoglu - editor of Econometrica and Clark Medal winner - on how to write papers and get published.

Estimating Cointegration Models with Structural Breaks

The Johansen cointegration procedure is one of the most popular methods of testing for cointegration. The tests and estimation are carried out by restricting a vector autoregression model. One of the key issues is deciding on the types of time trends and constant terms to include in the model. This is important because the distribution of the test statistics is different for each possible combination. The basic versions of the procedure assume that any linear time trend has a constant slope. But in reality the slope of the trend - which might represent a variable such as technological change - might not be constant. Johansen et al., 2000 investigated this issue and derived test distributions for the case where there are known structural breaks that cause the trend to change slope as well as for shifts in the model intercepts too. If you use EViews there seems to be a fairly user friendly way of carrying out these tests and estimating the model provided by David Giles at University of Victoria (Canada). David also has a lengthy blogpost explaining how to carry out this kind of analysis.

Reference:

Johansen, S., Mosconi, R. and B. Nielsen (2000), Cointegration Analysis in the Presence of Structural Breaks in the Deterministic Trend, Econometrics Journal, 3, 216- 249.