Top Economics Blogs

 

The latest edition of the top economics blogs list is out. This blog appears at entry 112.

Trends in RePEc Downloads and Abstract Views

For the first time in a decade, I updated my spreadsheet on downloads and abstract views per person and per item on RePEc.

The downward trends I identified ten years ago have continued, though there was an uptick during the pandemic, which has now dissipated. There was more of an increase in abstract views than in downloads in the pandemic.

Since the end of 2011 both abstract views and downloads per paper have fallen by about 80%. Total papers rose by around 260%, while total downloads fell 38% and total abstract views 27%. 

I'd guess that a mixture of the explanatory factors I suggested last time has continued to be in play.

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.

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.

Revenue-Neutral Carbon Tax with Global Temperature Indexation

The Climate Colab at MIT is running a competition for innovative climate policy proposals. Richard Hobbs is a local contender in this competition. You can support his proposal or make comments here. The winner will get to fly to MIT to present their proposal to US politicians, policy makers, economists, business executives and NGOs. Richard's proposal is a revenue-neutral carbon tax meant as a policy platform for the Republicans to bring forward to the next US election. It is revenue-neutral (cutting capital gains taxes and corporate taxes) and it is temperature indexed (so if climate sceptics are right the price trends to a low level).

Follow Me on Twitter

I'm planning on tweeting all my blogposts from now on, so you can follow me on Twitter. My username is sterndavidi. I've had a Twitter account since 2009 but never really used it much until now.

Follow Up on "Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylized Facts" at Econbrowser

James Hamilton has a new post on Econbrowser based partly on our paper Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylized Facts which I recently presented at the IAEE meeting in New York. I'd add that oil use has been flat in recent years but that was compensated for by increases in the use of natural gas, coal, and renewables. So, recent data don't substantially deviate from our stylized fact.

Today, I arrived at A Toxa, an island in Galicia, in the northwest of Spain. It is really beautiful here. Tomorrow the 6th Atlantic Workshop on Energy and Environmental Economics
starts here. I am giving a presentation in the final session tomorrow on our paper on modeling the emissions-income relationship using long-run growth rates.

Reforming IPCC Communications

The IPCC is currently discussing whether to change its approach to publications and communications in future years. We (Frank Jotzo and I) were asked about our opinions as former lead authors by the people in the relevant government departments here. It seems to make sense to have more of a continuous reporting model given the capability of the web. Perhaps each chapter could be updated one at a time on an ongoing cycle or even a Wikipedia style format could be adopted. On the other hand, the large septennial assessment reports do generate a big media splash for a few days when they are released, which the continuous communication format would not. If assessment reports are continued, then maybe they should all be released simultaneously, or each Working Group release its report 2 years apart. The 5th assessment report cycle saw WG1 release its report in September 2013 and then WG2 and WG3 released their reports two weeks apart in April 2013, which was somewhat confusing. We also thought that the IPCC plenary should be less prescriptive about the contents of each chapter including sub-sections and what should be in each subsection.

COIN in the UK have released a short report with some more radical suggestions. In particular, they think the IPCC should do human interest stories that are more suitable for most media outlets and use social media more effectively.

New Article in The Conversation

Michael Hopkins, an editor at The Conversation, suggested I follow up my blogpost on the IPCC 'censorship' controversy with a piece in The Conversation. That article is out today. The censorship story has also been picked up on by Science magazine.

If you are wondering whether to contribute to sites like The Conversation, I think it is well worth it, though it is a bit more work than I usually put into a blogpost. My blogpost last Thursday on the censorship issue has received 210 hits so far according to Google. People who just navigated to my home page rather than selecting the article title aren't counted, but probably don't amount to a huge number of additional views. Our 13th April article in The Conversation has got 4720 hits so far and my previous two articles there have gotten 1681 and 1859 hits each. Three of my blogposts have exceeded those numbers (11-13000 hits) and they are all about PLoS ONE and impact factors. My next best blogpost is this one with 1666 hits. Typical numbers are in the low hundreds if I'm lucky. So, I can get much more reach on a site like The Conversation than a typical post on my blog about my own research achieves. Of course, not all stories are going to be suitable for sites like these, but it's worth thinking about what might be suitable.

Produce a List of All Your Department's Publications on RePEc

Something I just discovered, you can make a list of all an academic institution's publications on RePEc. Here is the link for the Crawford School. I don't know where you can access this list from the menus on IDEAS (let me know if you know) but you can produce a list for another institution by pasting the institutions EDIRC handle into the URL in place of Crawford's.

P.S.
René Böheim explains in the comments how to navigate to the list of publications for each institution. I hadn't noticed that link before...

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.

Don't Compare Absolute Levels of GDP from Different Integrated Assessment Models

This article on Climate Progress claims that because world GDP is higher under the RCP 2.6 emissions scenario than under RCP scenarios with higher levels of carbon emissions that means that cutting emissions is good for the economy:

Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason GDP varies so much under the different scenarios is because each of the four scenarios was produced by a different modelling team using a different integrated assessment model. The RCP 2.6 team used the IMAGE model, which is a model that is relatively optimistic about the amount of economic growth that will occur under business as usual. In the EMF22 exercise it had one of the highest levels of GDP under the reference scenario. The other modelling teams used models with lower baseline scenarios for economic growth. This explains most of the difference. Our current research on modelling the costs of climate change shows that it's likely that models that find economic growth to be harder to achieve anyway also find that cutting emissions is harder. So probably they had to use a model like this to be able to model the RCP 2.6 scenario. In EMF22 most models couldn't model the more extreme scenarios.

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.

... and Now the Old Reader Shuts Down to Most Users...

After Google Reader shut down I migrated to the Old Reader, which offered a similar user interface. But they have been swamped with migrants from Google Reader and suffered a major crash and outage. They have decided to throw out all users who joined since 13th March unless they have donated money. I don't remember seeing a donate button. I would have been happy to pay for the service but the owners aren't interested in making money apparently. Now I have to move again. Seems that inoreader is the next port of call. Wonder how long it will last... Seems that anyone who could sell an application to run on users' machines that would help them access RSS feeds instead of a web-based RSS reader site would be able to make a lot of money.

P.S. 3:23pm In fact there is at least one application based RSS reader for Mac: NetNewsWire. Thanks to Chris Short for the recommendation. For the moment, InoReader is looking good, but if it goes the way of my previous two readers, I will give NetNewsWire a serious look.

ResearchGate Adds Department Statistics

Here is the link for Crawford School of Public Policy.

Stochastic Trend Featured in List of Savvy Maths and Stats Websites

You can see the other sites featured by following this link. There are some that I occasionally visit like Andrew Gelman's site and a lot of the others look interesting too.

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.

Article on Climate Mitigation Costs in The Conversation

I have an article today in The Conversation explaining the main findings of our recent paper in AJARE. This time I managed to squeeze the "low hanging fruit" in. There is even a picture of bananas :) Go over to The Conversation to read and discuss it.

ResearchGate 3.0

I've blogged a couple of times about ResearchGate and set up a profile there early in the year. At the time, I wasn't impressed with the coverage of social sciences. Recently, I've noticed a flurry of activity on ResearchGate with a number of colleagues putting up profiles and publications. You can see diffusion in action through the social network. They also have improved coverage in the social sciences including assigning points based on impact factor to journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index. Of course, it would make more sense to use citations rather than impact factors, but the latter is much easier...

So far, I am still finding it less useful than academia.edu or even LinkedIn. I don't really find any of them terribly useful, though occasionally I have been led to an interesting paper...

RePEc Citation Profiles

RePEc's coverage of citations is improving rapidly. It seems Elsevier has agreed to allow RePEc to use citations in Elsevier papers. This has increased the number of my citations in RePEc dramatically as a lot of my citations are in Energy Economics and Ecological Economics. I just found that you can now get a citation profile complete with graphs for anyone registered on RePEc. This joins the profiles available from Google, Scopus, Web of Science, and Microsoft. Of course, it is not as comprehensive as the former three services but probably a lot more accurate than the latter.