Environmental Economics

What do you do when you meet the anonymous referee who trashed your work?

You write it up and send it to the Chronicle:

Although I expected that he would be at the conference, I hoped he wouldn't attend my presentation. He did. But even in my wildest imagination I never could have foreseen that over the next three days we would share each other's company over breakfasts, dinners, and drinks. It was as if my academic karma had gone grievously awry in a previous life.

This was, after all, the scholar who had trashed (with prejudice) my book during the peer-review process and thereby scotched any chance I had with my original publisher ...

"How to Write an Anonymous Peer Review"

Kevin Haggerty (editor of the Canadian Journal of Sociology) in the Chronicle:

Writing anonymous peer reviews is an academic "black art." Such assessments are vital to scholarly publishing but we receive no formal training in how to write one.

Drawing on my own experiences as an author and editor, I would like to offer guidance about this for young scholars. Some of my observations are particularly germane to the social sciences, but many recommendations pertain to publishing across all disciplines.

Read the rest.

I don't even have time to read this morning

Recommended reading (Inching Toward Energy Independence in America):

Across the country, the oil and gas industry is vastly increasing production, reversing two decades of decline. Using new technology and spurred by rising oil prices since the mid-2000s, the industry is extracting millions of barrels more a week, from the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the prairies of North Dakota.

At the same time, Americans are pumping significantly less gasoline. While that is partly a result of the recession and higher gasoline prices, people are also driving fewer miles and replacing older cars with more fuel-efficient vehicles at a greater clip, federal data show.

Taken together, the increasing production and declining consumption have unexpectedly brought the United States markedly closer to a goal that has tantalized presidents since Richard Nixon: independence from foreign energy sources, a milestone that could reconfigure American foreign policy, the economy and more. In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005. ...

How the country made this turnabout is a story of industry-friendly policies started by President Bush and largely continued by President Obama — many over the objections of environmental advocates — as well as technological advances that have allowed the extraction of oil and gas once considered too difficult and too expensive to reach. But mainly it is a story of the complex economics of energy, which sometimes seems to operate by its own rules of supply and demand.

No comment, as I have only read one+ of five web pages. It appears to be a must read for anyone interested in energy, the environment and economics. Later, I may have something inane to say (fingers crossed).

And here is a new (to me) pop-up box from the NY Times:

Beginning in April, visitors to NYTimes.com will have access to 10 free articles per month instead of 20.

 

"UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

When the Offical Second Oldest Daughter of Env-Econ was in 2nd grade, she invited me in to school for parent reading day.  The choice of reading was up to me, so I chose to read The Lorax.  Now most like to think of The Lorax as a story of the inherent evils of industrialization at the expense of the environment.  As an environmental economist, I take a slightly less radical view and explain the message to second graders as a need to recognize the tradeoffs between growth and the environment, and also the need to recognize that actions have effects on others (never too early to learn about externalities). 

So...I'm excited for this:

And for those of you who have trouble finding the deeper meaning in Seuss' work, here's some help:

 

 

 

 

Economics of the Environment (new edition)

Rob Stavins:

The Sixth Edition of Economics of the Environment: Selected Readings has just been published by W. W. Norton & Company of New York and London.  Through five previous editions, Economics of the Environment has served as a valuable supplement to environmental economics texts and as a stand-alone book of original readings in the field of environmental economics.  Nearly seven years have passed since the previous edition of this volume was published, and it is now more than three decades since the first edition appeared, edited by Robert and Nancy Dorfman.  The Sixth Edition continues this tradition.

Environmental economics continues to evolve from its origins as an obscure application of welfare economics to a prominent field in its own right, which combines elements from public finance, industrial organization, microeconomic theory, and many other areas of economics.  The number of articles on the environment appearing in mainstream economics periodicals continues to increase, and more and more economics journals are dedicated exclusively to environmental and resource topics.

There has also been a proliferation of environmental economics textbooks for college courses.  Many are excellent, but none can be expected to provide direct access to timely and original contributions by the field’s leading scholars.  As most teachers of economics recognize, it is valuable to supplement the structure and rigor of a text with original readings from the literature. ...

The articles are timely, with more than 90 percent published since 1990, and half since 2005.  There are two completely new sections of the book, “Economics of Natural Resources” and “Corporate Social Responsibility,” and all of the chapters in the section on global climate change are new to the sixth edition.

In order to make the readings in Economics of the Environment accessible to students at all levels, one criterion I use in the selection process is that articles should not only be original and well written — and meet the highest standards of economic scholarship — but also be non-technical in their presentations.  Hence, readers will find virtually no formal mathematics in any of the book’s 34 chapters throughout its 733 pages.

via www.robertstavinsblog.org

I have the 5th (I think) edition. It is a great book to add for your graduate students in a dual-listed course to satisfy SACS 3b (or 3a).

Apparently the National Center for Environmental Economics has great taste in literature

Will Wheeler, friend of Env-Econ and economist at the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics was fishing for cheap attention* by posting the picture below on Facebook. 

*It worked

Basking in reflected glory

The #1 download for Resource and Energy Economics at SciVerse ScienceDirect TOP25 Hottest Articles:

Willingness to pay for electric vehicles and their attributes
Resource and Energy Economics, Volume 33, Issue 3, September 2011, Pages 686-705
Hidrue, M.K.; Parsons, G.R.; Kempton, W.; Gardner, M.P.

We were honored to have George present this paper in Boone on October 29, 2010, about three weeks before it was submitted. It was accepted and available online less than four months later. Dang.

Here is the abstract:

This article presents a stated preference study of electric vehicle choice using data from a national survey. We used a choice experiment wherein 3029 respondents were asked to choose between their preferred gasoline vehicle and two electric versions of that preferred vehicle. We estimated a latent class random utility model and used the results to estimate the willingness to pay for five electric vehicle attributes: driving range, charging time, fuel cost saving, pollution reduction, and performance. Driving range, fuel cost savings, and charging time led in importance to respondents. Individuals were willing to pay (wtp) from $35 to $75 for a mile of added driving range, with incremental wtp per mile decreasing at higher distances. They were willing to pay from $425 to $3250 per hour reduction in charging time (for a 50 mile charge). Respondents capitalized about 5 years of fuel saving into the purchase price of an electric vehicle. We simulated our model over a range of electric vehicle configurations and found that people with the highest values for electric vehicles were willing to pay a premium above their wtp for a gasoline vehicle that ranged from $6000 to $16,000 for electric vehicles with the most desirable attributes. At the same time, our results suggest that battery cost must drop significantly before electric vehicles will find a mass market without subsidy.

Ya know, the WSJ might just be a scam

I still get the WSJ headlines email even though I don't think the journal is worth $99/year anymore. Even so, sometimes I forget and click a link.

Thunderbird is very attentive to my needs.

Look for it soon in a library (or on the internet tubes) near you

From Matt Interis, former advisee, TOSU alum,  current Mississippi State University Assistant Professor and recent discoverer of John's abnormally deep voice :

We're in at E[cological] E[conomics]

What's 'in'?

I'm glad you asked.

WOODSY THE OPTIMAL OWL: ENVIRONMENTAL CAMPAIGNS, NORMS, AND IMPLICATIONS FOR PUBLIC GOODS POLICY

By: Matt Interis (mostly Matt's dissertation work) and Tim Haab (a little--much more a nod toward my stellar advising skills)

Abstract: Norms regarding private provision of a public good (e.g. cutting down on energy use, not littering) can affect the marginal gains from contributing to a public good and therefore people’s decisions about contributing to the public good. A model is proposed in which norms of private contributions to a public good can be influenced by public policy, and these norms affect people’s self-image, which derives from a comparison of one’s own contribution with the norm contribution. In this context, we examine the conditions under which private contributions to a public good are efficient, and the conditions under which policy affecting these norms improves social welfare. We find that (1) a benevolent social planner who fails to account for private provision norms will underprovide the public good, and (2) public policy that attempts to raise the norm contribution of private provision can increase social welfare if the effect of raising the norm does not have an extreme negative effect – either extremely small or extremely large – on peoples’ self-image.

Nice work Matt!

Quote of the day ;->

If only:

[John] List says more of his peers should take up field experiments.

“If Adam Smith saw what I do now, he would say it’s about time these economists started to go to the factories and go to the shops where people do business to see how people are behaving,” he says.

via www.bloomberg.com

And this gives me the opportunity to boast that I'm reading the Adam Smith bio. I'm on page 70+ and it is tough sledding (the small brain problem). But I'm sure that when I'm finished I'll have a better idea about what Adam Smith would have thought about my research.

I'll put my preliminary thought in the comments section ... and you can too!