Environmental Economics

Take a survey and ...

... help an environmental economics grad student (Please ...):

I am a graduate student conducting a survey for a research project. The questions in this survey will be used to explore how people evaluate events happening now differently than events happening in the future. This research will help policy analysts make better choices about environmental policy options. If you are at least 18 years old and interested in participating, click on the link below. The survey should take about 10 minutes.

The survey is located here

Several benefit-cost analysis opportunities from the CBO

What is the value of a wolf? What is the value of a crane? What is the value of a praire chicken? What is the value of a marine mammal?

• H.R. 1464, Great Cats and Rare Canids Act of 2007
• H.R. 1771, Crane Conservation Act of 2008
• H.R. 3930, Lesser Prairie Chicken National Habitat Preservation Area Act of 2008
• S. 2657, A bill to require the Secretary of Commerce to prescribe regulations to reduce the incidence of vessels colliding with North Atlantic right whales by limiting the speed of vessels, and for other purposes

Note: make sure you use a stated preference method (no enough folks have revealed preferences for wolves, cranes, chickens and whales) and do a literature search (related work has already been done).

A rejection story

In an email dated April 5, 2008 and headlined ...

NEP: New Economics Papers
Environmental Economics
Edited by: Francisco S.Ramos
Federal University of Pernambuco
Issue date: 2008-04-04

... is an ASU working paper:

Economic Growth and Threatened and Endangered Species Listings: A VAR Analysis
By:  Catherine M. Chambers, Catherine M. Chambers [should be Paul E. Chambers ... I'm correcting this], John C. Whitehead

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:apl:wpaper:08-04&r=env

We conduct several analyses to examine the link between threatened and endangered species listings and macroeconomic activity. Preliminary tests using ordinary least squares are run on both time series data on the national level and cross sectional data at the state level. The analysis is then extended using vector autoregressive (VAR) techniques. VAR results, impulse response functions and variance decompositions are reported to shed more light on the causal relationships between threatened and endangered species, GDP and population. Our results indicate that there is little or no empirical evidence that GDP growth rates lead to changes in the number of threatened and endangered species listings.

Key Words: Economic growth, endangered and threatened species, vector autoregression

[2008-04-04 is not yet on the NEP website.]

 

Marine Resource Economics listed in SSCI

From the inbox:

APRIL 2008
MARINE RESOURCE ECONOMICS LISTED IN
SOCIAL SCIENCES CITATION INDEX® - WEB OF SCIENCE

Marine Resource Economics is now listed among the following Thomson Scientific products:

Social Sciences Citation Index® (Web of Science)
Science Citation Index Expanded™ (Web of Science)
Current Contents®/Social and Behavioral Sciences
Current Contents®/Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences

The Web of Science provides seamless access to current and retrospective multidisciplinary information from approximately 8,700 of the most prestigious, high-impact research journals in the world.  Users can also navigate to electronic full-text journal articles. http://scientific.thomson.com/products/wos/

Current Contents Connect® is a multidisciplinary current awareness Web resource providing access to complete bibliographic information from over 8,000 of the world's leading scholarly journals and more than 2,000 books.  http://scientific.thomson.com/products/ccc/

AS AN AUTHOR THIS MEANS:

• Increased visibility and citation of your work
• Elevated recognition and status of your research

Marine Resource Economics is the leading journal covering a range of natural resource use and economic and policy issues in the global marine environment

"The Stern Review and Its Critics" symposium at REEP

I received an email on April 23 announcing free advance access of REEP content between April 9 and April 23:

Review of Environmental Economics and Policy Advance Access articles have been made available (for the period 9 Apr 2008 to 23 Apr 2008)

It is my opinion, but that might just be me, that it would be much more useful if I received the email on April 9. I'm an AERE member so I get the full text but what is the point of sending the email on April 23?

On the publication of Oxoby's AC/DC paper

ON THE EFFICIENCY OF AC/DC: BON SCOTT VERSUS BRIAN JOHNSON

ROBERT J. OXOBY, Department of Economics, University of Calgary, 2500 University, Drive NW, Calgary, AB Canada T2N1N4. Phone 403 220 2586, Fax 403 282 5262, E-mail oxoby@ucalgary.ca

We thank Steven Levitt for his support and popularization of this research (see, for example, Levitt, 2007). We thank Nathan Berg, Gary Charness, Bill Harbaugh, and Kendra McLeish for valuable suggestions and comments. We also thank a delayed Air Canada flight and a bar in the Vancouver airport for providing the time, space, and resources necessary to pursue this research. All errors are attributable to Air Canada.

Abstract: We use tools from experimental economics to address the age-old debate regarding who was a better singer in the band AC/DC. Our results suggest that (using wealth maximization as a measure of "better") listening to Brian Johnson (relative to listening to Bon Scott) resulted in "better" outcomes in an ultimatum game. These results may have important implications for settling drunken music debates and environmental design issues in organizations. (JEL C7, C9, D6, Z1)

Happy Earth Day

In honor of Earth Day I took another look at:

Freeman III, A. Myrick, Environmental Policy Since Earth Day I: What Have We Gained? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(1):125–146, 2002.

A celebration of benefit-cost analysis and incentive-based economic policies!

Car shopping day 1: Comparing gas mileage savings

Day 1:  Set up a spreadsheet.

We're in the market for a car.  The family minivan that I drive to and from work and to kids' sports might not make it through the summer without major investments--besides, it's starting to smell like a locker room inside from all the soccer and softball equipment stored in the back. 

My wife has been complaining about gas prices--who hasn't--so I decided to start our car search by asking:  How much does improved gas mileage really save us?

I'm in Las Vegas

I'm here to present my current favorite paper in the Department of Economics seminar series. Here is the presentation if you'd like to follow along from home at 3 pm PST: UNLV041808.ppt

Some travel notes:

• I highly recommend extending your trip the previous day to attend a Steve Earle/Allison Moorer show at the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, NC. They were awesome. We sang protest songs.
• I didn't realize Las Vegas was such a pretty place: mountain vistas ...
• I'm hanging out with Brad Wimmer, UK class of '93. I'm getting a lesson on the casino economy.
• I left my seminar outfit -- I agonize over what to wear -- at the dry cleaners in my haste to make it to the Steve Earle/Allison Moorer show. I'm currently wearing the outfit I had picked out to meet showgirls.
• I left my phone charger in the Ramada, I-40 exit 217.
• I left my memory stick with the presentation somewhere ... Lesson: always have a gmail backup.
• My 3 year old daughter hid my eyeglasses last week. She forgot where she hid them.

Who pays a tax? A case study (pun intended)

I usually apologize when a post isn't really environmentally oriented, but when a story serves to illustrate a point I tried to make last week and hits figuratively close to home, I gotta go with it.  From the Mercury News (via Drudge):

Joe Six-pack will have to pay a lot more to get his buzz on if  Assemblyman Jim Beall has his way.

The San Jose Democrat on Thursday proposed raising the beer tax by $1.80 per six-pack, or 30 cents per can or bottle. The current tax is 2 cents per can. That's an increase of about 1,500 percent.

So who pays the tax?