Missing Infinity Sign

I just noticed that in the published version of our paper in the current issue of the Energy Journal on p132 6 lines from the bottom of the middle paragraph there is a gap after “AEE ->” where there should be an infinity sign. In other words, as effective energy goes to infinity the stated function of effective energy goes to zero.

I just checked the proofs I was sent back in January and the infinity sign was there correctly in the proofs, so I am going to try to get the journal to fix this in the online version. Most people can probably guess that there should be an infinity sign where the gap is, but it is still annoying that it disappeared between the proofs and the final version of the article appearing.

Especially as this really is one of the key points in our paper. If energy is essential, so that the elasticity of substitution is less than unity between it and capital and labor, then as effective energy gets more and more abundant the growth model gets more and more like the standard Solow growth model where energy doesn't affect growth.

P.S. 30th July 2012

I just heard from the journal that they have corrected this in the electronic version of the article. I'm impressed by how quickly this was resolved.

Seminar at University of Western Australia

I will be giving a seminar at the School of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Western Australia on Friday 21st September at 11:00am. The title and abstract are below. It will be an extended version of the presentation I recently gave at IAEE.


Title: Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylized Facts

Abstract: Nicholas Kaldor highlighted six "stylized" facts to summarize the patterns that economists had discovered in national income accounts and to shape the growth models being developed to explain them. Recently Charles Jones and Paul Romer (2010, American Economic Journal: Macro) introduced a set of "new Kaldor facts" for growth economics. This paper attempts to summarize what we know about energy and economic growth in a similar set of stylized facts and to explain the patterns we see in the data. Both empirical regularities in the cross-section across countries and over time in individual countries will be presented and discussed. Models of the role of energy in the economy need to be able to reproduce and account for these facts. Though some of the results presented will be familiar, others stand in contrast to patterns found in other studies and others have not been explored much previously. Differences are mainly due to whether traditional biomass is included or not or whether purchasing power parity adjusted or market exchange rates are used.

Latest Crawford Research News is Out!

This is the second edition of our "Research News" which highlights our publications in leading journals (former A and A* ERA journals) and other outlets over the past month or so. The newsletter is put together by Sung Lee who is our director of research communications.

IPCC Scholarships

Click on the image to see more detail:



Students interested in applying for an IPCC scholarship should download an application form.

Completed application forms and supporting documents should be uploaded by 30 September 2012.

For more information contact:
Jonathan Lynn, E-mail: jlynn@wmo.int , Tel: + 41 22 730 8066
Werani Zabula, E-mail: wzabula@wmo.int Tel: + 41 22 730 8120

Jobs at Lund

Astrid Kander writes: We have one or more permanent positions as senior lecturer in Economic History out in Lund now. Deadline 9th September. Please look here. We welcome international researchers/teachers!

Lund has a large department of economic history as well as a regular economics department. I visited there in 2010 and am scheduled to visit again in each of the next two years as part of my ARC grant activity.

Tol vs. Ackerman

It's "interesting" to see exegesis of my editorial in Ecological Economics. If you are interested, go over there...

Final Versions of Two Papers Published

Nowadays, papers often are online for a while before they are officially published and in economics, of course, we often have a working paper version up for a while beforehand too. So I'm not sure when to announce that a paper is "published". Anyway, two papers are now up online in their final form with page numbers assigned:

Stern D. I. and A. Kander (2012) The role of energy in the industrial revolution and modern economic growth, Energy Journal 33(3), 125-152. Working Paper Version

Stern D. I., J. C. V. Pezzey, and N. R. Lambie (2012) Where in the world is it cheapest to cut carbon emissions?, Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 56(3), 315-331. Working Paper Version

Both papers are "paywalled" but there are free working paper versions as indicated. I've blogged about both previously - on Stern et al. here and on Stern and Kander here.

PLOS One's 2011 Impact Factor

I've previously blogged about why PLOS One has a relatively high impact factor despite not screening article by importance, only by technical accuracy. As the 2011 journal citation report
has now been released it's time to look at what happened to PLOS One's impact factor last year:



The impact factor is down but only by 7% despite the increase in articles published. Of course, the 13,781 articles published in 2011 aren't used to compute the impact factor. The 10,977 published in 2009 and 2010 are used to compute the 2 year impact factor. I would predict that the IF will decline further in 2012 with the doubling in the number of articles published in 2011 relative to 2010. But for the moment it is still pretty respectable.

2011 Journal Citation Report Released

Every June, Thomson Reuters releases the Journal Citation Reports that present citation data and most importantly impact factors for all the journals covered by the Web of Science. My immediate impression of this year's report is that impact factors are fairly stable in this iteration compared to last year and that the number of journals included in economics has stopped increasing. Over the last few years Thomson Reuters has doubled the number of journals covered in economics from around 160 to 320. This has doubled most impact factors as there are twice as many venues to be cited in as previously. However, in 2011 Ecological Economics has a two year impact factor of 2.713 and in 2010 its IF was 2.754. The total number of economics journals seems relatively stable:



The expansion in the number of social science journals covered clearly is a result of competition by Scopus, which started in 2004 boasting a much wider coverage of the social sciences than the Web of Science published by Thomson-Reuters.

For a primer on bibliometric indicators click here.

CCEP Papers in June 2012

CCEP Working Papers continued to get a healthy rate of downloads in June. The most downloaded paper was Olivia Boyd's paper on Chinese energy and climate policy. I'm pretty happy about that as I invited Olivia to contribute the paper after seeing her masters thesis on academia.edu and she put a lot of effort into producing a shorter version.

Presentation at IAEE Meeting in Perth

I'm presenting on Tuesday afternoon at the IAEE Conference in Perth in one of the parallel sessions from 2-3:30pm. I've put my slides up on the web but as usual they probably aren't that informative without the accompanying talk. Several of us from ANU will be at the meeting and I am looking forward to meeting up with old and new colleagues from elsewhere. This is also my first time ever visiting Western Australia the only Australian state or mainland territory I haven't yet been to.

Taxes versus Trading versus Revenue Recycling

My colleagues Jack Pezzey and Frank Jotzo have a forthcoming paper in JEEM: "Tax-versus-trading and efficient revenue recycling as issues for greenhouse gas abatement" on the relative performance of emissions taxes versus emissions trading under uncertainty about both abatement costs and BAU emissions as well as different levels of revenue recycling. Uncertainty about future costs of abating emissions is well known to lead to a welfare advantage of emissions taxes over permit trading. They show that uncertainty about BAU emissions is more important and further increases the advantage of taxes. I think this is important because the massive fluctuations in the price of carbon in the EU market for example seems to be largely due to fluctuations in economic activity. They write: "overall our results substantially boost the welfare case for using a carbon tax instead of trading."

However, they argue that whether the raised revenue is efficiently recycled through cuts in existing distorting taxes will be practically of much greater significance than these differences between taxes versus trading. In the presence of existing distorting taxes an emissions tax can have negative impacts on welfare if those taxes are not also reduced - the so called "tax-distortion effect". However, I would have thought that the giving away of free permits or exclusion of activities from control is likely to be greater in extent than exemptions under a carbon tax. This would further increase the advantages of taxes. Or maybe I'm wrong about that?

Expert Review Registration Open for FoD WG3 AR5

Registration for expert review of the first order draft of Working Group III's contribution to the IPCC AR5 is now open. We'll be dealing with all these comments in Vigo in November. Right now we are still working on getting the FoD together :)

Nature Climate Change Article on the Introduction of Carbon Pricing in Australia

My colleague Frank Jotzo has an article in Nature Climate Change discussing the introduction of the carbon price in Australia from 1st July this year. It's a good summary if you haven't been following this issue closely.

Reminder: Christian Gross Seminar 29th June

Sorry that I haven't posted much recently. Things have been very busy with wrapping the seminar up and grading and preparing a course for next semester. As well Stephan Bruns is visiting from Jena to work with me and we are making good progress on our meta-analysis project. Christian Gross will also be here, but only for one day - 29th June - I will meet him at the IAEE meeting in Perth before that. Christian is giving a seminar at Crawford School at 12:30 on 29th June in Seminar Room 1 in the Stanner Building. More details are available here.

IEA Announce that Global CO2 Emissions Rose 3.2% in 2011

IEA announce that global CO2 emissions rose 3.2% in 2011. This is in line with our prediction in our Nature Climate Change paper that emissions growth in 2011 would be slower than in 2010 though it is still really quite rapid.

Special Issue of "Ephemera" on Carbon Markets

Ephemera is an open-access journal on "theory, politics, and organization". You can access the special issue here.

Google Scholar Changes Search Page

Google has "updated" the Google Scholar home page. This includes changing the linked to Advanced Search to a tiny arrow inside the search box. You have to hover over it for a while or click on it to realize that it links to Advanced Search. As far as I can see, the new interface does not include the option to only search certain fields such as "business and economics" which the old Google Scholar Advanced Search allowed.

Visitors

We just hosted a quick visit by Bob Costanza and Ida Kubiszewski to the Crawford School. Bob gave a public lecture and Bob and Ida participated in roundtable discussions with PhD students and faculty from the Crawford School and the Fenner School.

I have some more colleagues lined up to visit later this year. Next month, Stephan Bruns will be visiting Crawford for the whole of June. He will be working with me on our energy-GDP causality research. He will give a presentation in our economics PhD seminar series. At the end of the month, Christian Gross, also from Jena, will visit briefly and give a seminar. In September/October, Astrid Kander will visit to work on our ARC project.

Energy Strategy Reviews

A new journal in the energy sphere: Energy Strategy Reviews. The journal claims that it:

"provides authoritative content on strategic decision-making and vision-sharing related to society's energy needs. The journal stimulates the exchange and sharing of knowledge and best practice in energy strategy, planning and implementation."

An interesting graph in the opening editorial shows the number of academic papers produced by each country based on data from Scopus:



China is about to overtake the US. I wonder what caused the big jump in China's share in 2004-5?

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.

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.

Mexico and the UK have the Toughest Climate Change Policies

The Mexican legislature passed one of the strongest national climate-change laws so far on 19 April reports Nature. The UK and Mexico now have similar binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. IN my opinion, another piece of evidence against the simplistic environmental Kuznets curve theory. At least, against the theory that income-related preferences drive emissions reductions. Mexico has world mean income per capita - in fact I often think that Mexico is a microcosm of the world as a whole - many of its indicators are near world means. That means it is not a poor country, of course, but it is not rich either.

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 :)

Crawford School Working Papers in April 2012

This month the three most downloaded papers across our six active working paper series were:

Carbon Pricing that Builds Consensus and Reduces Australia's Emissions: Managing Uncertainties Using a Rising Fixed Price Evolving to Emissions Trading, Frank Jotzo, 36 downloads.

IMF Programs: Who Is Chosen and What Are the Effects?, Robert J. Barro and Jong-Wha Lee, 22 downloads.

Total Factor Productivity and Economic Growth in Indonesia, Pierre van der Eng, 16 downloads.

Total downloads were 651 with 2135 abstract views across the six active series.

There are also quite a lot of new papers:

Papers by Hal Hill, Shuhei Nishitateno, and Budy Resosudarmo in the Arndt-Corden series.

Three new papers in the ASARC series.

Papers by Andrew Macintosh and Kaliappa Kalirajan in the CCEP series.

Also a paper by Stephen Howes in the Development Policy series.

Sorry for omitting coauthors.