Environmental Economics

Doesn't this just create a different fishery?

From the Columbus Dispatch:

Federal officials say the despised Asian carp may have breached an electronic barrier designed to prevent it from invading the Great Lakes and jeopardizing their $7 billion sport fishery.

Officials with the Army Corps of Engineer say Friday that DNA of the giant carp have been found north of the barrier in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

If correct, that would mean the carp might reach Lake Michigan if they get through a navigational lock. From there, they could spread throughout the Great Lakes and out-compete native species for food.

Asian carp escaped from Southern fish farms in the 1990s and have been migrating up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. They can exceed 4 feet in length and 100 pounds.

I'm going to the SEA meetings!

As Tim previously announced, you'll be able to find me in San Antonio this weekend. Here is the link to my conference schedule. I'll also be attending this great looking session.

I'll be presenting our (Tim, Rob, Kurt and John) recreation demand models for marine fishing for the last time, hopefully. We have a website to support this project: http://econ.appstate.edu/marfin. Check it out for the full report, data, programs, presentations and (coming soon) a working paper.

Picture of the day

Hat tip: Rich Woodward

Where I wasn't last night

Where I won't be this weekend

John's headed to the Southern Economic Association meetings in San Antonio this weekend.  Unfortunately I can't make it.  At the risk of exposing her to John's typcial meeting antics, I'm sending one of my brilliant Ph.D. students, Carolina Castilla*, in my place.  She'll be presenting some work we're doing on consumers' price search strategies. Here's the abstract for Consumer Willingness to Search in the Gasoline Retail Market...

Another reason not to recommend this blog--to anyone: my D3 football playoff brackets

Here is the bracket (PDF). I'll send a bumper sticker to anyone who tops my point total (your picks are due by Friday at 5 pm [in the comments section]).

My picks are below.

A short story about Jason Shogren, 2009 AAEA Fellow

First, congrats to Jay! Here is a bit from the journal announcement:

Jason Shogren has left an indelible impact on the profession of agricultural and applied economics. ...

Prior to his appointment at his alma mater, he held positions at Appalachian State, Yale, and Iowa State Universities. ...

... he enjoys fishing and performing with his hard acoustic roots band (www.jshogren.com).

Funny story. I'm on the job market and interviewing with Appalachian State at the SEA meetings in San Antonio, November 1989* (or was it the ASSAs? Anyway, doesn't matter). App is one of my dream jobs and I hear that some great environmental guy is down there. Shogren and Larry Ellis, then chair and our interim chair last year, were in the interview room and things are going great. Until, Shogren asks me about incorporating uncertainty in my model. I explain that I only have funding for four years of graduate study, I'm hoping to defend in 6 months, incorporating uncertainty would take too long and I don't think it is a big deal anyway. After leaving I'm wondering if that was the wrong answer ...

Later that day I'm in the elevator, Shogren gets on and is talking with a buddy. The buddy asks, "have you interviewed anyone any good?" (or something like that). My ears perk up as Shogren goes down the list. I cringe and get sucked into the elevator wall as he doesn't mention Whitehead.

I guess I got the last laugh 15 years later!

*There was an active SEA job market until the recession of the early 1990s killed it.

Picture of the day

A Boone, NC neighborhood bear

Photo credit: Scott Herman

More on conference economics

I'm heading to the SEA meetings tomorrow and am wondering where everyone is staying. Not at the conference hotel, it seems. Here is some background:

The [SEA] hotel is overcharging for each room to pay for the conference meeting rooms. When facing a high price, such as in a year with limited travel budgets, consumers tend to shop around. ...

An alternative would be to go ahead and charge a higher registration fee (about another $100, I think). Registration fees are reimbursable by employers and there are no substitutes. You must wear you name badge to gain admittance to the meeting rooms. Then, attendees could feel free to shop around and find the hotel that suits them best.

From the inbox yesterday:

We’re staying at the [non-conference hotel]. It’s a great historic hotel  and MUCH cheaper than the conference hotel, and my travel budget is seriously constrained this year.  ...

The Western hotel policy is just as stupid. Went to Vancouver this year. Bombarded by emails from WEA telling me I had to book before the deadline to get the “special” conference rate on the hotel room. I just went to the hotel web site, saw the regular rack rate was lower than the “special” rate, got an additional discount for AAA, and saved more than $300 for the 7-night stay. Furthermore, because we stayed 7 nights—which we couldn’t have done at the “special” rate, they gave us a primo room ...

Attention regional economics conference organizers: Demand falls as the price of substitutes falls and the internet makes it easy to find substitutes.

Book Review: SuperFreakonomics

I finished SuperFreakonomics the other night and give four-fifths of it a thumbs up (chapter 5 gets a thumbs down). My guess is that if a reader picked up SuperFreak first it would give the same positive jolt to utility that Freak gave when read first. I enjoyed SuperFreak, but not as much as the first. Maybe that is due to diminishing returns? Most of the stories are good but the highlight of SuperFreak is the epilogue where we're told how monkeys learn to use fiat money, in a variety of ways. Besides the lack of economics in the climate change chapter, I can take issue with several things, including:

• Prostitutes aren't patriotic because they work on July 4th.
• The drunk walking stuff is an assertion. 
• Volcanoes don't produce positive externalities.
• The disconnect between two statements repeated more than once: "it is hard to change people's behavior" and "people respond to incentives." Huh?
• A 25% reduction in the number of "minor" injuries suffered by kids in car accidents due to car seats and relative to seat belts is shrugged off as a small reduction. It sounds like a lot fewer injuries to me. Well worth the cost of the car seat.

Yet, the strangest thing to me about the book is the unnecessary dissing of lab experiments.

I've been through this stuff before as a young researcher trying to use the contingent valuation method. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the stakes were raised and revealed preference types and lab experimentalists (here is how I put it recently) dumped on surveys that elicited hypothetical behavior. Researchers eventually saw revealed preference and stated preference data as complements and not substitutes. Most recently, choice experiment types are dumping on contingent valuation (er, behavior). Come on, guys, these methods aren't necessarily competing!

Anyway, who cares what I think? Here is how Falk and Heckman conclude their recent piece, which seems to be motivated by the lab vs field experiment debate, in Science (abstract):

In this context it is important to acknowledge that empirical methods and data sources are complements, not substitutes. Field data, survey data, and experiments, both lab and field, as well as standard econometric methods can all improve the state of knowledge in the social sciences. There is no hierarchy among these methods and the issue of generalizability of results is universal to all of them.

Hard to argue with that.

Now that I'm finished I can get back to Dan Brown and my bag of cheetos.

Update: Add this to the things I can take issue with:

• "Eyeballing" a too-short length of the global temp time series data and concluding cooling should not have led to a global cooling subtitle.

Here is a fairly comprehensive post detailing the negative reviews of the climate change chapter (including one of mine). And, yikes, apparently a link to it was deleted from the Freakonomics blog comments section.