Media Release: Where is it Cheapest to Cut Carbon?

We have a media release out about our Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics article "Where in the world is it cheapest to cut carbon emissions?"

I actually really like an earlier version of this where we extended the "low hanging fruit" analogy, which really encapsulates our idea:

"Dr Pezzey said that cutting emissions could be compared to picking apples: “We’d expect there to be more ‘low-hanging fruit’ - low cost or easy options for cutting emissions - in countries that have had less aggressive energy efficiency policies and are therefore more emissions-intensive like the US or Australia.” he said.

“But the more fruit there is below a given height, the bigger the total crop is. A common global carbon price is like an agreement on how high up the tree each country should go to harvest emission cuts. So the total cost of such a policy should be higher in an emissions-intensive country, as it requires a larger total cut in its emissions.”

But it's hard to get too many ideas into a very short piece.

What Happened to the US Sulfur Emissions Market?

An interesting paper from Schmalensee and Stavins on the market for sulfur emissions in the US. This market is often cited as an example of the success of environmental economics and specifically cap and trade and I have used it as that in my teaching in the past. But what has happened more recently? The authors describe it as "ironic". After a period of relative stability often cited as a great success, the price of permits first sky-rocketed and then collapsed:



Essentially, the George W. Bush administration tried to tighten the cap on emissions significantly pushing the price up. In reaction EPA said they'd reconsider starting the collapse in price and then the courts overturned the new regulations. Then a couple of years ago the Obama administration then proposed state based emissions caps and limited interstate trading couple of years ago the market stopped trading entirely.

Schmalensee and Stavins still think that the program was a success if "ironic". I think this shows just how volatile emissions trading programs are and the likelihood of changes being made in response to price spikes that threaten or destroy the program. I think that the volatility of the European Union carbon trading market tells a similar story and increasingly shows that carbon taxes are the way to go. I used to be in favor of emissions trading due to the supposed certainty it would give on emissions reductions but real world experience shows that this could be a case of the perfect being the enemy of the possible.

Ingelfinger Rule

Until I read this blogpost I didn't know this had a name: "The Ingelfinger Rule". Apparently, Franz Ingelfinger was the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. In 1969 he ruled that authors couldn't be published in his journal if they engaged in pre-publication or even media publicity around their findings prior to their article seeing print. This was for purely monopolistic reasons. But it is a rule that has become very entrenched across the biomedical and broader biological academic journal world. It hasn't had any influence at all in the world of economics, where prepublication is the norm. Occasionally, economists engaged in interdisciplinary work find that they can't get published because they weren't aware of these very different cultural rules.

Journal Selectivity, Impact Factor, and Citations

Following the debate on Elsevier and open access publication, I have noticed increasing rhetoric about journal impact factors. A journal impact factor is the mean citations received in a given year by articles published in a journal in a number of preceding years. It's long been known that this measure is a rather imperfect indicator of the citation potential of an article published in that journal as the distribution of citations received by articles in any given journal is very dispersed and skewed. A few star articles often get the majority of citations and many more articles are cited little or not at all.

There is a correlation between a journal's impact factor and the number of citations individual articles in the journal get, though it is low. Obviously, it is better to evaluate papers by the number of citations they get themselves. There is an implicit assumption that citations accrue very slowly in the social sciences and especially in economics, so that citations are not useful for evaluating recent research and hence either impact factors or costly secondary peer review are used instead.

We are having an internal debate at the Crawford School about whether to use metrics and which metrics to use in allocation of research funding within the school. So, I have been thinking that if impact factors are only weak predictors of citations are they more strongly correlated with something else? That something else could be the selectivity of journals aka rejection rate. It seems very likely that there is a strong correlation between rejection rate and impact factor.

The problem in testing this is that there seems to be only limited data on rejection rates. I've done a very quick search on this and came up with some information. de Marchi and Rocchi found a significant partial correlation (p=0.04) between rejection rate and impact factor for a sample of 72 journals from all disciplines that responded to their survey. For the ecology journals that Aarssen et al. looked at the correlation between rejection rate and impact factor was 0.687, though there are some low impact journals with quite high rejection rates:



The authors argue that this may be because these low IF journals are flooded with low quality papers that they have to reject. A high rejection rate among a pool of low quality research isn't the same as a high rejection rate among a pool of higher quality research. Still, despite this, IF does seem to be a better predictor of journal selectivity than of citations and on the whole we might think that papers that pass more selective processes tend to be higher quality.

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.

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...

CAMA Moves to Crawford School

As of today, CAMA has moved to the Crawford School from the ANU College of Business and Economics. Warwick McKibbin has already moved into an office just down the corridor from me. I think this is a great development for the Crawford School and will increase our strength in macroeconomics and finance as well as concentrating all ANU environmental and energy economists in Crawford. Bringing CAMA and its network to Crawford should also strengthen our research profile and ranking. Several of us are already research associates in CAMA and I am looking forward to increased collaboration opportunities.

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.

ARC Laureate Fellowships Announced

The ARC announced the award of this year's round of Laureate Fellowships. The Laureate Fellowships - previously called 'Federation Fellowships" are the most prestigious grants offered by the ARC they provide a salary top up for the fellow, post-doc positions, and project funds for five years.

ANU won 4 out of the 17 Laureate Fellows announced and the College of Asia and the Pacific got two of these. The other two ANU awards went to my former Fenner School colleague David Lindenmayer and Eelco Rohling who is a climatologist at University of Southampton who will move to the ANU.

Elsewhere, there are several awards for coral reef science and John Quiggin's fellowship was renewed a second time. His proposed research will examine how financial regulation can be improved to reduce the vulnerability of the financial system and the macroeconomy to unforeseen shocks. His previous Federation Fellowship was focused on adaptation to climate change in the Murray Darling Basin.

James Cook university won two fellowships. Apart from that all the awards went to the Go8.

Congratulations to all the recipients!

Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies

This is a new open-access journal published from the Crawford School and produced by Blackwell Wiley. First issue will be in early 2014 but the website is already open for submissions. I'm a member of the editorial board.

Several Crawford Jobs Available

Includes three environmental/environmental economics positions.

ARC Future Fellowships Announced

The ARC announced the outcomes of this year's Future Fellowships round today. Unfortunately, Crawford didn't get any - we made two applications - but ANU did very well and the College of Asia and the Pacific had a 54% success rate overall. Nationally, the success rate was 35%. Presumably the success rate was high because the ARC unexpectedly brought forward the application date catching a lot of people unawares.

Interestingly, no fellowships were awarded in economics, which may partially explain our zero success rate.

WG3 FoD Now Available for Review

Register here as an expert reviewer of the FoD. This will give you access to the first order draft of Working Group III's part of the 5th IPCC Assessment Report. I'm a coauthor of Chapter 5. In November we will meet in Vigo, Spain to process the comments.

ECI Short Course

I will be presenting in a short-course provided by the Energy Change Institute at ANU: Energy change in a carbon‐trading world. Please pass on the information about the course to anyone you think might be interested.

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.