How Has Research Assessment Changed the Structure of Academia?

Does measuring something change it?  In quantum mechanics measurement disturbs what is being measured, which is referred to as the observer effect. The same is often true in social systems, especially of course when measurement is attached to rewards. The UK and Australia have been conducting periodical research assessment exercises - the REF and ERA. In the case of the UK, research assessment started almost three decades ago. In Australia, the first research assessment was only conducted in 2010 but the founding of the ARC in 1988 and its independence in 2001 are both milestones in the road to increased emphasis on competition in research in Australia.

Johnston et al. (2014) show that the total number of economics students has increased in UK more rapidly than the total number of all students, but the number of departments offering economics degrees has declined, particularly in post-1992 universities. Also, the number of universities submitting to the REF under economics has declined sharply with only 3 post-1992 universities submitting in the latest round. This suggests that the REF has driven a concentration of economics research in the more elite universities in the UK. BTW the picture above is of the Hotel Russell, which the Russell Group of British universities is named after.

Neri and Rodgers (2014) investigate whether the increased emphasis on research in Australia has had the desired effect in the field of economics. They investigate the output of top economics research by Australian academics from 2001 to 2010. By constructing a unique database of 26,219 publications in 45 top journals, they compare Australia’s output internationally, determine whether Australia’s output increased, and rank Australian universities based on their output. They find that Australia’s output, in absolute and relative terms, and controlling for differences in page size and journal quality, increased and, on a per capita basis, is converging to the levels of the most research-intensive countries. Finally, they find that the historical dominance of the top four universities is diminishing. The correlation between the number of top 45 journal articles published in 2005-2010 and the ERA 2012 ranking is 0.83 (0.78 for 2003-8 and ERA 2010).

References

Johnston, J., Reeves, A. and Talbot, S. (2014). ‘Has economics become an elite subject for elite UK universities?’ Oxford Review of Education, vol. 40(5), pp. 590-609.

Neri, F. and Rodgers, J. (2014). ‘The contribution of Australian academia to the world’s best economics research: 2001 to 2010’, Economic Record.

Peer Review vs. Citation Analysis in Research Assessment Exercises

Existing research finds strong correlations between the rankings produced by UK research assessment exercises (RAE) and bibliometric analyses for several specific humanities and social science disciplines (e.g. Colman et al., 1995; Oppenheim, 1996; Norris and Oppenheim, 2003) including economics (Süssmuth et al., 2006). Clerides et al. (2011) compare the 1996 and 2001 RAE ratings of economics departments with independent rankings from the academic literature. They find RAE ratings to be largely in agreement with the profession’s view of research quality as documented by independent rankings, although the latter appear to be more focused on research quality at the top end of academic achievement. This is because most rankings of departments in the economics literature are based on publications in top journals only, which lower ranked departments have very few of.

Mryglod et al. (2013) analyse the correlations between the values of Thomson Reuters Normalised Citation Impact (NCI) indicator and RAE 2008 peer-review scores in several academic disciplines, from the natural to social sciences and humanities. The NCI computes the normalized impact factor across a unit of assessment (an academic discipline at a given university) in the RAE based on only the publications actually submitted to the RAE. Mryglod et al. (2013) compute both average (or quality) and total (or strength) values (average multiplied by number of staff submitted to the RAE) of these two indicators for each institution. They find very high correlations for the strength indicators for some disciplines and poor correlations at for the quality indicators for all disciplines. This means that, although the citation-based scores could help to describe institution level strength (which is quality times size), in particular for the so-called hard sciences, they should not be used as a proxy for ranking or comparison of research groups. Moreover, the correlation between peer-evaluated and citation-based scores is weaker for the “soft” sciences. Spearman rank correlation coefficients for their quality indicators range from 0.18 (mechanical engineering) to 0.62 (chemistry). However for strength the correlations range from 0.88 (history and sociology) to 0.97 (biology). This is because quality is correlated with size and so the two factors reinforce each other.

Mryglod et al. (2014) attempt to predict the 2008 RAE retrospectively and the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) before its results were released. They examined biology, chemistry, physics, and sociology. Of the indicators they trialled, they found that the departmental h-index had the best fit to the 2008 results. Departmental h-index is based on all publications published by a department in the time window assessed by the relevant assessment exercise. The rank correlation ranged from 0.83 in chemistry to 0.58 in sociology. They find that the correlation with the RAE for the immediate h-index is as good as the correlation in later years with the h-index of the same set of publications.

Bornmann and Leydesdorff (2014) argue that one of the downsides of bibliometrics as a research assessment instrument is that citations take time to accumulate while research assessment exercises are designed to assess recent performance:

“This disadvantage of bibliometrics is chiefly a problem with the evaluation of institutions where the research performance of recent years is generally assessed, about which bibliometrics—the measurement of impact based on citations—can say little…. the standard practice of using a citation window of only 3 years nevertheless seems to be too small.” (1230)

They argue further that bibliometrics:

“can be applied well in the natural sciences, but its application to TSH (technical and social sciences and humanities) is limited.” (1231)

But rather than assuming that peer review is the preferred approach to research assessment and citation analysis should only be used to reduce cost, we can ask whether the review conducted by research assessments such as the REF and the Australian ERA meets the normal academic standards for peer review. Research does show that peer review at journals has predictive validity for the citations that will be received by accepted papers compared to those received by rejected papers. However, evidence for the predictive validity of peer review of grant and fellowship applications is more mixed (Bornmann, 2011). Therefore, further research is warranted on the use of citation analysis to rank academic departments or universities in research assessment exercises. Sayer (2014) argues that the peer review undertaken in research assessment exercises does not meet normal standards for peer review. He compares university and national-level REF processes against actual practices of scholarly review as found in academic journals, university presses, and North American tenure procedures. He finds that the peer review process used by the REF falls far short of the level of scrutiny or accuracy of these more familiar peer review processes. The number of items each reviewer has to assess alone means that the review cannot be of the same quality as reviews for publication. And reviewers will have to assess much material outside their area of specific expertise. Sayer argues that though metrics may have problems, a process that gives such extraordinary gatekeeping power to individual panel members is far worse.

Given the large number of items that panels need to review they are likely to focus on the venue of publication and at least in business and economics handy mappings of journals to REF grades exist (Hudson, 2013). Regibeau and Rockett (2014) build imaginary economics departments entirely composed of Nobel Prize winners and evaluate them using standard journal rankings geared to the UK RAE. Performing the same evaluation on existing departments, they find that the rating of the Nobel Prize departments does not stand out from other good departments. Compared to recent research evaluations, the Nobel Prize departments’ rankings are less stable. This suggests a significant effect of score “targeting” induced by the rankings exercise. They find some evidence that modifying the assessment criteria to increase the total number of publications considered can help distinguish the top. But if departments composed entirely of Nobel Prize winners perform worse than current departments then it is hard to know what such assessment means.

Sgroi and Oswald (2013) examine how research assessment panels could most effectively use citation data to replace peer review. They suggest a Bayesian approach that uses prior information on where a item was published combined with observations on citations to derive a posterior distribution for the quality of the paper. We could then estimate, for example, what is the probability that a paper belongs in the 4* category given where it was published and the early citations it has received. Stern (2014) and Levitt and Thelwall (2011) show that the journal impact factor has strong explanatory power in the year of publication but that this declines very quickly as citations accumulate. So, this approach would be most useful for papers published in the last year or two before the assessment, but for earlier research outputs the added value over simply counting citations would be minimal.

References

Bornmann, L. (2011) ‘Scientific peer review’, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, vol. 45, pp. 199‐245.

Bornmann, L. and Leydesdorff, L. (2014). ‘Scientometrics in a changing research landscape’, EMBO Reports, vol. 15(12), pp. 1228–32.

Clerides, S., Pashardes, P. and Polycarpou, A. (2011) ‘Peer review vs metric-based assessment: testing for bias in the RAE ratings of UK economics departments’, Economica, vol. 78(311), pp. 565–83.

Colman, A. M., Dhillon, D. and Coulthard, B. (1995) ‘A bibliometric evaluation of the research performance of British university politics departments: Publications in leading journals’, Scientometrics vol. 32(1), pp. 49-66.

Hudson, J. (2013). ‘Ranking journals’, Economic Journal, vol. 123, pp. F202-22.

Levitt, J.M. and Thelwall, M. (2011). ‘A combined bibliometric indicator to predict article impact’, Information Processing and Management, vol. 47, pp. 300–8.

Mryglod, O., Kenna, R., Holovatch, Y. and Berche, B. (2013). ‘Comparison of a citation-based indicator and peer review for absolute and specific measures of research-group excellence’, Scientometrics, vol.97, pp. 767–77.

Mryglod, O., Kenna, R., Holovatch, Y. and Berche, B. (2014). Predicting Results of the Research Excellence Framework Using Departmental H-Index, arXiv:1411.1996v1.

Norris, M. and Oppenheim, C. (2003) ‘Citation counts and the research assessment exercise V: Archaeology and the 2001 RAE’, Journal of Documentation, vol. 59(6): pp. 709-30.

Oppenheim, C. (1996) ‘Do citations count? Citation indexing and the research assessment exercise’, Serials, vol. 9, pp. 155–61.

Regibeau, P. and Rockett, K.E. (2014). ‘A tale of two metrics: Research assessment vs. recognized excellence’, University of Essex, Department of Economics, Discussion Paper Series 757.

Sayer, D. (2014). Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF. Sage.

Sgroi, D. and Oswald, A.J. (2013). ‘How should peer-review panels behave?’ Economic Journal, vol. 123, pp. F255–78.

Stern, D.I. (2014). ‘High-ranked social science journal articles can be identified from early citation information’, PLoS ONE, vol. 9(11), art. e112520. 

Süssmuth, B., Steininger, M. and Ghio, S. (2006) 'Towards a European economics of economics: Monitoring a decade of top research and providing some explanation', Scientometrics, vol. 66(3), pp. 579-612.

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.

The Rebound Effect

Working on an article for New Palgrave. Here is a draft of the section on the rebound effect:

The Rebound Effect

Energy saving innovations reduce the cost of providing energy services such as heating, lighting, industrial power etc. This reduction in cost encourages consumers and firms to use more of the service. As a result energy consumption usually does not decline by as much as the increase in energy efficiency implies. This difference between the improvement in energy efficiency and the reduction in energy consumption is known as the rebound effect. Rebound effects can be defined for energy saving innovations in consumption and production. In both cases the increase in energy use due to increased use of the energy service where an efficiency improvement has happened is called the direct rebound effect. For consumer use of energy estimated rebound effects are usually small typically in the range of 10-30% (Greening et al., 2000; Sorrell et al., 2009). Roy (2000) argues that because high quality energy use is still small in households in India, demand is very elastic, and thus rebound effects in the household sector in India and other developing countries can be expected to be larger than in developed economies. In the case of energy efficiency improvements in industry the rebound effect at the firm level could be large as the form could greatly increase their sales as a result of reduced costs. However, under perfect competition for an industry supplying domestic demand it is much harder for the industry as a whole to expand output and so the direct rebound effect would be more limited. Rebound effects are likely to be larger for export industries that have more opportunity to expand production (Grepperud and Rasmussen, 2004; Allan et al., 2007; Linares and Labandeira, 2010).

As a result of the reduction in the cost of the energy service consumers will demand less of substitute goods and more of complementary goods. These include other energy services. Firms will make similar changes in their demands for inputs. There will also be additional repercussions throughout the economy – non-energy goods whose demand has increased require energy in their production; the fall in energy demand may lower the price of energy (Gillingham et al., 2013; Borenstein, 2015) increasing energy use again; and the efficiency improvement is a contribution to an increase in total factor productivity, which tends to increase capital accumulation and economic growth that results again in greater energy usage (Saunders, 1992). These additional effects are called indirect rebound effects, though the latter two may be treated separately as “macro-level rebound effects” (e.g. Howarth, 1997). Direct and indirect rebound effects together sum to the economy-wide rebound effect.

Estimates of the economy-wide rebound effect are few in number (e.g. Turner, 2009; Barker et al., 2009; Turner and Hanley, 2011) and vary widely (Stern, 2011; Saunders, 2013; Turner 2013). At the economy-wide level “backfire”, where energy use increases as a result of an efficiency improvement, or even “super-conservation” where the rebound is negative are both theoretically possible (Saunders, 2008; Turner, 2009). It is usually assumed that the indirect rebound is positive and that the economy-wide rebound will be larger in the long run than in the short run (Saunders, 2008). Turner (2013) argues, instead, that because the energy used to produce a dollar’s worth of energy is higher than the embodied energy in most other goods, the effect of consumers shifting spending to goods other than energy will mean that the indirect rebound could be negative and the economy-wide rebound may also be negative in the long run. Borenstein (2015) presents further arguments for negative rebounds.

All evidence on the size of the economy-wide rebound effect to date depends on theory-driven models, which have limited empirical validation. Turner (2009) finds that, depending on the assumed values of the parameters in a simulation model, the rebound effect for the UK can range from negative to more than 100%. Barker et al. (2009) provide the only estimate of the global rebound effect, estimating the rebound from a set of IEA recommended energy efficiency policies at 50%.

References

Allan, G., Hanley, N., McGregor, P., Swales, K., Turner, K. 2007. The impact of increased efficiency in the industrial use of energy: A computable general equilibrium analysis for the United Kingdom. Energy Economics 29: 779–798.

Barker, T., Dagoumas, A. and Rubin, J. 2009. The macroeconomic rebound effect and the world economy. Energy Efficiency 2: 411-427.

Borenstein, S. 2015. A microeconomic framework for evaluating energy efficiency rebound and some implications. Energy Journal 36(1): 1-21.

Gillingham, K., Kotchen, M. J., Rapson, D. S. and Wagner, G. 2013. The rebound effect is overplayed. Nature 493: 475-476.

Greening, L. A., Greene, D. L. and Difiglio, C. 2000.Energy efficiency and consumption - the rebound effect - a survey. Energy Policy 28: 389-401.

Grepperud, S. and Rasmussen, I. 2004. A general equilibrium assessment of rebound effects. Energy Economics 26: 261-282.

Howarth, R. B. 1997. Energy efficiency and economic growth. Contemporary Economic Policy 25: 1-9.

Linares, P. and Labandeira, X. 2010. Energy efficiency: Economics and policy. Journal of Economic Surveys 24(3): 583-592.

Roy, J. 2000. The rebound effect: some empirical evidence from India. Energy Policy 28: 433-438.

Saunders, H. D. 1992. The Khazzoom-Brookes postulate and neoclassical growth. Energy Journal 13(4): 131-148.

Saunders, H. D. 2008. Fuel conserving (and using) production functions. Energy Economics 30: 2184–2235.

Saunders, H. D. 2013. Historical evidence for energy efficiency rebound in 30 US sectors and a toolkit for rebound analysts. Technological Forecasting & Social Change 80 (2013) 1317-1330.

Sorrell, S., Dimitropoulos, J., Sommerville, M. 2009. Empirical estimates of the direct rebound effect: A review. Energy Policy 37: 1356–1371.

Stern, D. I. 2011. The role of energy in economic growth. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1219: 26-51.

Turner, K. 2009. Negative rebound and disinvestment effects in response to an improvement in energy efficiency in the UK economy. Energy Economics 31: 648-666.

Turner, K. 2013. “Rebound” effects from increased energy efficiency: a time to pause and reflect. Energy Journal 34(4): 25-43.

Turner, K. and Hanley, N. 2011. Energy efficiency, rebound effects and the Environmental Kuznets Curve. Energy Economics 33: 722-741.

The Industrial Revolution Remains One of History's Great Mysteries?

Following on from my previous post, Clark's chapter reviews possible reasons for why the industrial revolution happened in England when it did. He rules out theories based on improved institutions, increased human capital in terms of an increase in quality of children instead of quantity, and increased population driving higher innovation rates (why not China then?). Surprisingly he doesn't cite either Allen's or Wrigley's recent books, though he does reference Hansen and Prescott (2002) - he doesn't like it. So energy doesn't get a mention except to reiterate the arguments of Clark and Jacks (2007). He concludes that: "The Industrial Revolution remains one of history's great mysteries." (p260). But why should we expect just one of these factors to explain the Industrial Revolution. Instead, I think several factors together might very well explain it.

Does Age Heaping Mean the Romans were Innumerate?

The system of dating years since some ancient point in the past used today by the Western, Islamic, and Hebrew Calendars among others makes it much easier to remember how old you are. If you know you were born in 1964 or 5725 and know that this year is 2015 or 5775, it's easy to work out how old you are. But in ancient Rome it seems that it was not even common to date years by the number of years the emperor had ruled, let alone since the foundation of Rome. It was more common to name years by the names of the consuls in office. So, it's not surprising that there is a lot of age-heaping on Roman tombstones. Gregory Clark argues that this shows that Romans were very innumerate. That might be partly true, but the lack of a proper dating system also needs to be taken into account.

My Year in Review 2014

I've been doing these annual reviews since 2011, they're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year. It is now a full year since I ended my term as research director at the Crawford School. As a result, it has been a really productive year research-wise :)

I published five articles in the following journals: PLOS ONE, Biomass and Bioenergy, Energy Economics, The Energy Journal, and Climatic Change, and we have a paper in press at The Energy Journal. We also released three working papers that aren't yet published: "Modeling the Emissions-Income Relationship Using Long-run Growth Rates", "Substitutability and the Cost of Climate Mitigation Policy", "Global Energy Use: Decoupling or Convergence". There are four more papers that we have sent for review but have not yet posted as working papers.

We also published our edited book of classic papers on the economics of climate change with Edward Elgar. There is also Chapter 5 of the IPCC Report on trends and drivers of emissions and a small piece on the environmental Kuznets curve and there is an updated review of the EKC, which will be published in the Elsevier Online Resources.

The release of the IPCC 5th assessment report in April was of course a big event and I appeared on TV and radio several times - first on the release day and then in some follow-up coverage on the supposed cover up in the Summary for Policymakers.

ABC News24

This was the final year of our ARC grant (actually, March 2015 is formally the end of the project). Astrid Kander visited Sydney in February to work with researchers at UNSW and Jack Pezzey and I went to meet up with her and work on our project. She rented a house for her and two other Swedish researchers close to Coogee Beach (and to UNSW), so it was a very nice research trip :) The weather wasn't quite as good when I visited Lund in November for a week!

Coogee Beach, Sydney


I also visited England and Germany on my October-November trip giving seminars at LSE, Lund, and University of Kassel. That was my third international trip of the year. In June-July I did a round the world trip including the IAEE conference in New York City, the Atlantic Workshop in A Toxa, and the World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economics in Istanbul. In September I attended the IAEE Asia meeting in Beijing as well as a workshop at Tsinghua University. The AARES Conference in Port Macquarie, NSW rounds off the conference list and I also gave a couple of seminars in Canberra in the first half of the year.

 Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

Two researchers visited me to collaborate - Zsuzsanna Csereklyei in January and February and Chunbo Ma in April. I wrote an ARC Discovery proposal with Zsuzsanna, which wasn't funded but we were in the top 10% of the unfunded proposals and so we'll give it another go. Chunbo came to work on the current ARC grant. We have now submitted a paper on substitution elasticities in China, which I presented at the Tsinghua workshop in September.

The special issue of Energies on "Energy Transitions and Economic Change", which I guest edited is now completed with fourteen papers are already published including the final paper by Astrid Kander and colleagues.

It was my last time teaching the introductory micro-economics class The Economic Way of Thinking 1. This course was great for the positive feedback I got from some of the students on the course. All the students are from developing countries and many are a bit "scared" of math and economics. After going through this course a lot of students feel much more confident dealing with this kind of material. In the coming year I will be teaching quantitative methods to environmental studies students instead. I also taught my energy economics course again and will continue to teach it in the future. It is being rebranded next year as an economics course, IDEC8029, instead of a general Crawford School course (CRWF8017).

It's hard to believe, but I posted more than 100 blogposts this year. The most popular was this one, a close runner-up is the post on the animated gif of energy use and growth, which we produced at James Hamilton's suggestion. I met Hamilton at the IAEE meeting in New York. I also got much more involved with Twitter this year. Mostly, I tweet my blogposts, but also tweet short items, which don't really need comment or analysis, that in the past I might have blogged about.

Energy and Growth: The Animated GIF

As always, it is possible to predict some of the things that will be happening in the coming year. I expect a couple more papers will get completed over the summer. Also, we are going to resubmit the ARC proposal, hopefully this time successfully. There will also be a couple of book chapters surveying the energy and growth topic. One for Palgrave. I've submitted abstracts to a bunch of conferences in Rotorua (AARES), Perth (at Curtin U), Leeds (ESEE), and Antalya (IAEE) and will likely submit to the EAERE conference in Helsinki. Not sure how many of these I can actually go to. Maybe my coauthors will present at some of them. Hopefully Donglan Zha will get funding to visit Crawford from the middle of next year.

Energies Special Issue Update

There are now thirteen articles in the special issue, which I edited. The latest two are by Peter O'Connor and Cutler Cleveland and Juliana Subtil Lacerda and Jeroen van den Bergh. There is only one paper still to be published, which is by Astrid Kander and coauthors. P.S. Astrid's paper was published two days after I posted this!

Global Energy Use: Decoupling or Convergence?

I have another new working paper coauthored with Zsuzsanna Csereklyei out titled: "Global Energy Use: Decoupling or Convergence?". This paper follows up on our paper on the the stylized facts of energy and growth using the methods from our paper on modeling the emissions-income relationship using long-run growth rates.
In particular, we focus on the stylized facts that there is a stable relationship between energy use and GDP per capita over time and that there has been convergence in energy intensity over time.

The following graph shows the relationship between the long-run growth rates of energy use and GDP per capita from 1971 to 2010:

As we saw in our previous paper, higher economic growth rates are associated with higher rates of growth in energy use, though there is quite a lot of variation in individual countries. As the intercept of the regression line is zero, on average there is no time effect that is reducing energy use across all countries in the absence of economic growth. On the other hand, many developed countries like the UK, Sweden, or even the United States have seen declines or little increase in energy use per capita in recent decades. So, what can explain that?

Our model adds additional explanatory variables to the regression illustrated above. To test whether there is decoupling, so that growth has less effect or even a negative effect on energy use at higher income levels we include an interaction term between the growth rate and level of income per capita. This is the same idea as the test for the environmental Kuznets curve in the Anjum et al. paper. We find that the regression coefficient for this interaction term is actually positive! So, actually growth has larger rather than smaller effects on energy use in higher income countries. However, we find that the level of income has a negative effect on the growth rate of energy use. This means that at higher income levels there is an improving energy efficiency effect so that energy use declines over time ceteris paribus. We call this "weak decoupling". The following graph shows the contribution of these and other effects to the growth in energy use in different groups of countries:

Though, as shown by the black dots, the growth rate of energy use  per capita is highest in upper middle income countries, the contribution of economic growth is greater in high income countries. But this positive effect of growth is offset by "weak decoupling" and other effects.

The most important of these other effects globally is convergence. Countries that had high energy intensities at the beginning of the period saw declines in energy intensity, ceteris paribus. But, this effect was most important in the low income countries, some of which were the most energy intensive in our sample in 1971. In the high income countries, convergence raised energy use on average. But in the US and Canada it contributed -1.0% and -0.9% p.a., respectively, to reducing energy use. So, there is a lot of variation across countries.

Projections and forecasts of future energy use should not, therefore, assume that economic growth will be associated with decreased energy use in the future. Instead, the scale effect seems to be alive and well. On the other hand, there appear to be improvements in energy efficiency across high income countries irrespective of their growth rates or their initial level of energy intensity. These would tend to moderate the growth in energy use as countries get richer at the upper end of the income continuum. At the lower end of the income continuum the same effects serve to raise energy intensity. But, some of the major reductions in energy intensity in countries, such as in the United States and China, have probably been the result of convergence towards the global mean, and so are unlikely to be reproduced in the future.

On the more technical side there are a couple of innovations in this paper too. We extend the method we used in the growth rates paper to allow for a spatially correlated error term. If there are omitted variables which are spatially correlated and the explanatory variables are also spatially correlated then it is likely that the two are correlated and regression coefficient estimates will be inconsistently estimated. To deal with this problem we use an approach called spatial filtering. This removes the spatial autocorrelation by adding additional variables to the regression which model the spatial process. These are in fact the eigenvectors of a transformation of the spatial weighting matrix. With 93 countries there are 93 eigenvectors, so the tricky part is deciding which of these eigenvectors to include in the regression. Tiefelsdorf and Griffith (2007) developed a procedure to do this, which we use.

Another issue is that if we want to give our model a causal interpretation, then we have to assume that GDP growth causes growth in energy use and not vice versa. Obviously changes in energy use might also cause GDP. We argue though that the latter effect is probably quite small compared to the effect of GDP on energy and so the estimated effect of GDP on energy is only biased upwards by a relatively small amount. The income elasticity of energy is likely to be close to unity whereas the elasticity of GDP w.r.t. to energy might be only 0.05. This is possibly one reason why it has been so hard for researchers to find robust signs of Granger causality from energy use to GDP. On other hand, this is maybe why a simple naive regression of GDP on energy use appears to find a very large effect of energy on GDP. The estimated regression coefficient is biased upwards by the effect of income on energy demand.

New Research Shows that Release of Carbon in PETM was More Gradual

Following up on my post last year on research that the PETM was probably caused by an impact. Latest research, published in Nature Geoscience, shows that, no, the release was much more gradual. I wonder how these two pieces of research can be reconciled?

How Ambitious is China's Proposal to Peak CO2 Emissions by 2030?

A few days ago China and the US jointly announced emissions targets for 2030. China proposes that their carbon emissions will peak by not later than 2030. How ambitious is this goal? In our 2010 paper in Energy Policy, Frank Jotzo and I asked how ambitious China's 2020 target to reduce emission intensity by 40-45% between 2005 and 2020 was. We concluded that it represented significant effort beyond expected intensity reductions under business as usual.

In a recent paper Xiliang Zhang and coauthors project Chinese emissions under three scenarios. Under a no policy scenario, emissions rise to 16.5 billion tonnes (Gt) in 2030 and continue to rise throughout the century. Under their "continued effort" scenario where current policy initiatives are continued, emissions rise to 11.8 Gt in 2030 and peak in 2045. Finally, under their accelerated effort scenario, emissions rise to 10.2 Gt in 2030 where they peak. So, on this basis, China's proposal does constitute a new accelerated effort.

Another way of looking at these scenarios is in terms of the rate of reduction in emissions intensity in 2030. The rates are -1.9%, -3.4%, and -4.1% respectively. China's 2020 emissions intensity target represents a 3.6% annual rate of reduction in emissions intensity from 2005 to 2020. So, by this metric the new target represents an increase in effort over the current policies.

Figshare

I just signed up for Figshare. In case you haven't heard about it yet, it is a site for sharing all kinds of research data. I uploaded the citation data I used in my 2013 article in the Journal of Economic Literature. This was a lot easier than adding data to my university's data repository so, in future, I think I will use Figshare exclusively for larger datasets I want to make public. The service is free and you get a DOI for your dataset.

Article Published Today in PLoS ONE

My paper "High-Ranked Social Science Journal Articles Can Be Identified from Early Citation Information" was published today in PLoS ONE. For background on the paper, check out my blogpost or this story on the Crawford School website.

I'm travelling tomorrow to Kassel where I will be working with Stephan Bruns on what we think is a really awesome (Stephan's words :)) extension to this paper. We are also hoping to finish an econometric theory paper we are writing.

Stylized Facts Paper Accepted for Publication

My paper with Zsuzsanna Csereklyei and Mar Rubio: "Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylized Facts" has been accepted for publication in the Energy Journal. I've already blogged quite a bit about the paper so won't repeat that here. What is new is that we also now have a working paper version available. The working paper version has color figures, which I think are prettier and easier to understand in some cases than the black and white ones we had to use for publication.

Odds of Becoming a Professor

This graphic is from a 2010 UK report and is based on UK data. Only 0.45% of PhDs eventually become a full professor. I didn't think the odds were quite that low. Of course, as in Australia, full professor is a higher rank than it is in the US as we have 4 rather than 3 academic ranks. Another interesting report I recently saw on Australian PhDs. Apparently in 2011 Australia graduated about 7000 PhDs which is about 1/7 of the US figure, even though Australia has 1/15 of the US population. And the number of students starting PhDs in the year was 11,000.

Five Minute Paper

You may have heard about the Three Minute Thesis. Now we have the Five Minute Paper. Actually, it's called Elsevier Audioslides. Authors of articles in Elsevier journals are invited to create voiced over slide presentations about their papers to be hosted on Elsevier's website. The maximum length of recording is five minutes. As my presentation at LSE next week will cover my recent paper with Astrid Kander (as well as current work), I thought I could use some of the slides I made for an audioslides presentation on our paper. I didn't bother writing a script and just made it up as I went along. But that's the way it goes in a conference presentation too and, of course, in the Three Minute Thesis competition.

Here is the result.

I've also got an invite to do one for my paper in Biomass and Bioenergy. But as I've never presented that paper, I would have to make up the slides from scratch and I'm not sure it's worth the effort. I think I'll ask my coauthor if he wants to do it :)

Seminar at University of Kassel

I promised more details on my seminar at University of Kassel: here they are. I will present our paper on modeling the emissions income relationship using long-run growth rates. My presentation will be at 2pm on 18 November in Sitzungsraum K33/FB07. If you need more details about location, ask Stephan Bruns who is organizing the "Empirical Workshop on Energy, Environment, and Climate Change" of which this talk is part. The workshop starts at 10 am and there will also be presentations by Heike Wetzel, Andreas Ziegler, Astrid Dannenberg, and Stephan.

New Dimensions in Ecological Economics: Elgar E-Book

Our edited book New Dimensions in Ecological Economics: Integrated Approaches to People and Nature is now available as an E-Book from Edward Elgar. This book was based on the 2000 ISEE international conference in Canberra that Mike Young and I organized.

Environmental & Resource Economics Acceptance Rate 2013

Just got an e-mail from the journal noting that they got just over 600 submissions in 2013. They have already reached that level at this point of 2014. Back in 2004 they got less than 200 submissions. This is a common trend at many journals including Ecological Economics, where I am an associate editor. The email from ERE also notes that their impact factor is now 1.7 and this too has risen over time (0.6 in 2005). One of the reasons for that is the increased coverage of economics journals in the Journal Citation Reports. The number covered doubled in the last decade and that increases the opportunity to get cited in outlets covered by the JCR. One thing, ERE don't report on is their acceptance rate, but it is easy to calculate. According to the JCR they published 83 articles in 2013. Therefore, the acceptance rate is 13%.

I previously reported that the acceptance rate at ERE was 21%. So, this is a big drop. This is also a common trend.

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.

Update on Energies Special Issue

We now have nine papers published in the special issue of Energies on energy transitions and economic change and there are more to come. The latest paper is by Robert Kaufmann on the end of cheap oil and the implications for the United States and the former Soviet Union. This was one of the invited papers. The other published so far was the paper by Steve Sorrell. Also recently published is a paper by James Kahn et al. on Brazil's plans for expanding hydropower and by Rodriguez-Molina et al. on the smart grid.

Upcoming Seminars

I am giving three seminars in Europe in October and November. First up is 28th October at 1pm at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics. I will talk about "Energy Transitions and the Industrial Revolution." Then on 12th November at 2:15pm I will talk at the Department of Economic History at Lund University. Topic: "Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylised Facts"  - a topic that blog readers should be pretty familiar with by now.

Finally, I will be presenting at the University of Kassel in Germany on 18th November. More details to come.

Fuel Choices in Rural Maharashtra Accepted for Publication

My paper with former masters student Jack Gregory was just accepted for publication in Biomass & Bioenergy. Jack is just starting his PhD at University of California, Davis.

This paper went through one of the more tortuous paths to publication, largely because we didn't have any sort of price data, which made the paper less interesting to economics journals. This is where we sent it: World Development (submitted 27 Jan 2012, desk reject, too narrow case study), Environment and Development Economics (referee review), Energy Policy (referee review), Energy (desk reject, too economics focused), Biomass and Bioenergy (revise and resubmit and accept). More than 2.5 years to get it published. But that's not very unusual...

Workshop on Research Metrics

I submitted one of the 152 responses to HEFCE's call for evidence on research metrics. BTW, my paper was just accepted by PLoS ONE :) Anyway, HEFCE and the University of Sussex are holding a one day workshop at SPRU on the potential for metrics in research assessment. Register here and see the program here. As I am in Australia, unfortunately I can't attend - I'm actually going to be in England in late October and early November - but maybe some of you can.

New Professorial and Research Positions at SPRU, University of Sussex

SPRU (Science Policy Research Unit) at the University of Sussex, UK is embarking on an ambitious new research strategy, focused on long-term transformative change and innovation. As part of this strategy, we are looking to recruit three dynamic, innovative and highly respected academic leaders to join the SPRU team as Professors. In addition, we are seeking to appoint two experienced research staff to join the Research Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand (CIED), led by the Sussex Energy Group at SPRU. The posts are as follows:

Professor of Energy Policy: This person will lead the Sussex Energy Group and will have an outstanding background in energy and climate policy, preferably with an emphasis on innovation and transitions.

Professor in Sustainability Transitions: This person will have an outstanding background in sustainability transitions, history of technology and/or science and technology studies.

Professor in Innovation and Evolutionary Economics: This person will have an outstanding background in evolutionary economics, economics of innovation, institutional economics, economic history and/or development economics.

Senior Fellow in Innovation and Energy Demand: This person will have a strong track record in innovation studies and/or energy and climate policy and will be expected to help shape the Centre’s research programme and design and lead research projects.

 Research Fellow in Innovation and Energy Demand: This person will have a background in innovation studies and/or energy and climate policy and will be expected to design and lead research projects and conduct empirical research.

 Full details of the jobs can be found here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/newsandevents/apps/jobs