Environmental Economics

Whoa, a double rainbow all the way across the sky

So bright and vivid. So beautiful. (sobbing)

Photo Credit: John Whitehead

Location: Boone, NC

Date: May 24, 2011

I'm not in the business of giving any financial advice either ...

... but don't give away all your stuff before 10/21:

Harold Camping said it had "dawned" on him that God would spare humanity "hell on Earth for five months" and the apocalypse would happen on 21 October.

Mr Camping said he felt "terrible" about his mistake.

But he said he could not give financial advice to those who spent their life savings in the belief the end was nigh. ...

Asked if he had any advice to offer those who had given away their material wealth in the belief the world was about to end, Mr Camping said they would cope.

"We just had a great recession. There's lots of people who lost their jobs, lots of people who lost their houses... and somehow they all survived," he said.

"We're not in the business of giving any financial advice," he added.

via www.bbc.co.uk

i.e., deal with it.

 

More from the MMQB (the source of much of my economics inspiration)

Peter King:

I respect Ray Lewis, and I also do not travel in his circles. I don't know who has told Lewis the crime rate by the general populace in America is going to go up if there's no pro football this fall, but someone has, and he's buying it. Lewis told Sal Paolantonio of ESPN: "If we don't have a season, watch how much evil, which we call crime, watch how much crime picks up,'' he said. When SalPal asked why, Lewis said: "There's nothing else to do.''

It's a nice headline, but I'm not buying it. I suppose it could happen, but unless we get burglars and thieves saying they did it because the NFL wasn't on TV on fall Sundays this year, I'm not buying what Lewis is selling.

via sportsillustrated.cnn.com

The Sports Economist disagrees as well (mostly, if "other economic activities" = "evil, which we call crime"):

Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys and Rob Baumann, Rob Baade, and myself find ourselves, at least partially, in odd agreement with Lewis. Our studies of real per capita personal income and taxable sales in cities that have experienced work stoppages in professional sports have found that people do indeed find other things to do when sports are not around. But rather than turning to crime, these two studies find people simply turn to other economic activities leading to no obsevable changes in real economic variables despite the lack of football, baseball, hockey, or basketball.

On the other hand, Daniel Rees and Kevin Schnepel’s work on college football suggests that at least at the collegiate level, crime rises when the game is played not when it is absent. According to the pair of economists, “Our results suggest that the host community registers sharp increases in assaults, vandalism, arrests for disorderly conduct, and arrests for alcohol-related offenses on game days. Upsets are associated with the largest increases in the number of expected offenses.”

I’m just glad my research is the side that basically agrees with Ray Lewis. I certainly wouldn’t want to be Daniel and Kevin contradicting him.

Update:  Dan and Kevin have informed me that they have emailed Ray Lewis a link to David Card and Gordon Dahl’s paper, “Family Violence and Football” (QJE, 2010), which shows that NFL games (and not just college games) are also linked to observable increases in domestic violence. Since this paper more directly contradicts Lewis’ claim, Dan and Kevin assume they are off the hook. And since David is a full professor at Berkeley, they figure he is in the best position to pay for a security entourage.

 

And yet for some reason we put some level of credence on long-term hurricane forecasts

"Specific severe weather forecasting more than days in advance is little more than guessing. ... There are simply too many small-scale variables involved," says the Storm Prediction Center's website.

via www.dispatch.com

Monday Morning Quarterback fumbles on price gouging*

Peter King:

Hertz Should Be Ashamed of Itself Dept.:

I rented a full-sized Hertz vehicle for my two-day trip to North Carolina and the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Awards. Two days, $44 a day. Drove the car 169 miles. The tank read 5/8ths when I pulled into the Charlotte Douglas International Airport's Hertz lot at 5:35 a.m. Tuesday.

"Did you fill the tank with gas?'' the courteous check-in gal asked.

"No, sorry,'' I said.

She noted the mileage and handed me the receipt.

The receipt for charges of $249.31.

The gas for driving less than a half-tank cost more ($89.40) than renting the car for two days, minus taxes ($88). Hertz charged $8.99 per gallon for refueling. That seems fair (he said sarcastically).

Then there was the $17.98 for NeverLost GPS (which did its job; I was never lost on the trip) and the usual collection of cloudy charges -- "concession fee recovery,'' $11.92 ... "customer facility charge,'' $7 ... "vehicle licensing cost recovery,'' 62 cents -- that makes the renting of cars in America so joyous.

Three-eighths of a tank of gas for $89.40? If that's not price-gouging, I don't know what is.

via sportsillustrated.cnn.com

Unfortunately for Peter, price gouging laws don't cover situations where the buyer knows well in advance, and even signs a form stating the fact, that he'll be gouged if he can't find a petrol station before he returns his rental car.

*A classic play on words! Buy me a beer!

A sports post only my co-blogger (a dang good U9 baseball coach) might love

I enjoyed my time in Greenville, NC too, but that doesn't mean I think they belong in the Big East:

While he's back at East Carolina, [USF coach Skip Holtz] did a great radio interview with Pirate Radio 1250, which you can listen to here. He was asked about the potential for Big East expansion in football, and here's what he had to say:

"I think it's going to be really interesting. We're going to learn an awful lot Sunday when we go to the conference meetings (in Ponte Vedra). We'll sit down for three days and that will be a big part of discussions. I think the thing we have to continue to look at as the Big East is what do we need to do to strengthen our program, strengthen our league. There's been a lot of talk about do you go from nine to 10, which I don't know how much sense that really makes, when the Big Ten left the model of 10, the Pac-10 has left the model of 10. Both of them more or less said 'This model doesn't work. Let's go to 12.' I think we have to look hard at it. Having TCU come into the league will add an awful lot of instant energy when you look at the success they've had right now as a program. It gives you a balanced schedule with four (home) and four (road). I think we need to look hard at going to 12. Is that where we're going? Are we going to 12? And if we're going to 12 and we're going to add three, then I would love to see East Carolina as one of the additions in this league. I have fond memories of East Carolina and my time here in Greenville. I look at their fanbase and their following and the support they have here, and being located here in the Carolinas, I think East Carolina can pick up and really grow into the program Virginia Tech has become, with the opportunity to be in a (league) like the Big East. It's one of the things I'd love to see happen. It's going to be really interesting to see how this is going to play out here over the next couple of months, but I think it's definitely something the Big East needs to look at and consider."

via www.tampabay.com

Comments:

1. As soon as ECU joined C-USA (and even before) the boosters started yapping about joining the Big East (and ACC). Ridiculous, IMHO (and I had season tickets to football and basketball).
2. ECU has an awesome football atmosphere and baseball is always competitive. But, basketball can't even compete in C-USA. Do you really want to go ofer in the conference every year?
3. ECU has always wanted to be VaTech.
4. 10 football schools in a conference -- ludicrous!
5. The biggest thing that bugs me is that ECU's primary color is purple, but the uniforms now look more blue than anything. 
6. The hope around Boone is that C-USA loses some schools and Appstate moves up from I-AA to fill the C-USA void (more likely Sun Belt teams move up and Appstate joins the Belt -- and then visiting teams find that there is more snow than sun in Boone).
7. If there was anything decent on TV tonight (after 60 Minutes -- whoa, did you see the Hamilton interview [I agree, with the Armstrong camp, that guy is only motivated by profit /sarc)]), env-econ readers wouldn't need to delete all these posts!

Hat tip: Dr. Bo who says "Sounds good. That would take the league up to 151 schools playing basketball."

 

At least I'm not one of the "panjandrums of the AEA"

I always receive a boost to my daily utils when I run across a blog comment from Barkley Rosser:

One funny thing in Moffitt’s piece is his pushing of the new AEJs, which are clearly being pushed hard by the panjandrums of the AEA, with Moffitt wanting to encourage them as the dumping ground for AER rejects. However, despite his claim that they are somehow the next tier behind the top 5 and above all the field journals, this is a ridiculous joke. A couple of them are doing well and might get there someday, partilcularly the Macroeconomics one. But the JME is certainly still well ahead of it, and probably the JMCB also. The other one doing not too badly is Esther Duflo’s Applied one, which is moving up, but still not quite up to the top field journals it competes with. As for the other two, Policy and particularly Micro, they are both doing very poorly, if not outright disasters. One may get lots of brownie points in a department where one of their editors is located, but otherwise they are nearlhy zeroes in terms of getting citations or any serious ranking.

Here is the link.

My question is, what is going on at AEJ Policy and Micro that makes them disasters (Policy is the one where environmental economics papers might fit)? I don't follow what is going on at the top (20!) journals very closely (read: not at all).

 

 

I rarely leave comments at other blogs (and usually regret it when I do ... much safer to post comment here)

In response to a comment on this post at MR, I said:

“Why does it take more than six weeks to review a paper?”

It takes a day or two to review a paper but about 6+ weeks for a good referee to get around to reviewing it. “Good referees” are those who are doing research in the area of your paper. And by “get around” I mean that it takes that long for the paper to rise to the top of the stack of the to do list. Good referees are teaching their classes, writing their own papers, writing grant proposals, doing university service and oftentimes have one or more papers to review in front of yours.

What authors need to remember is that the folks who agree to review your paper are the ones supplying public goods for very little reward. The folks we ought to be fussing about, the ones who indirectly cause significant delays, are those who refuse to undertake reviews.

That said, some referees agree to review a paper in 6 weeks and then never do it. It would be great if they could be outed somehow!

via marginalrevolution.com

There are some comments on my comments and replies.

More "advice on how to publish in economics journals"

Tyler Cowen:

Via Development Impact, here is the link (pdf).  I agree with most of the recommendations, which come from editors including Robert Moffitt.

via marginalrevolution.com

Each piece in the CSWEP newsletter is a great read especially if you are (1) new at publishing in economics or (2) a veteran researcher, but you gave up research for the rapture, and you didn't get raptured so that now you need a refresher. In addition, I would reiterate #1 and #2 (with a couple of extras) and offer #3 in contrast to the advice you usually get:

1. Don't write a long paper (20-30 pages is usually sufficient). My immediate reaction as a referee is to groan and procrastinate reading it. Then when I do get around to reading it I'm not happy about what the author and editor is asking me to do. Do you want your referees in that frame of mind? Write up all of your robustness checks and sensitivity analyses as appendices and either (a) post it as an online working paper and put it in your references or (b) refer to the "available upon request" results in a footnote.
2. If you get a rejection at one journal, follow at least some of the advice of the referees before you resubmit to another journal. Editors at each of the journals you submit to choose referees from your reference list, papers that are missing from your reference list, the Google Scholar, Scopus or other similar means. It is quite surprising how often the same names pop up. I've refereed the same paper at different journals more than once (when you try to avoid the task by telling the editor that you have refereed it before they almost always ask you to go ahead and review it again). The easiest referee report to write is the one that you already wrote.
3. Don't overshoot with your journal choice. I've never understood the typical advice that if the journal you first submit your paper to results in a revise and resubmit then you didn't shoot high enough. Typically, even when you don't aim at the highest journal level your first submission is a rejection. So let's say you aim even higher (AER, QJE etc.), then your first two submissions will be rejections and you are on your third journal, the clock is ticking, and you have other papers you would rather work on. 

That said, there are exceptions to each of these rules:

1. You are the most important economist in the world and your work deserves its own special issue at a major journal.
2. Your referee is an idiot.
3. You really think the paper has a chance, you are actually a top economist, you are a mid-level economist and have never experienced the thrill of getting rejected at a top journal, ...

Friday Beer Post

The BEER Act would reduce from $7 to $3.50 the tax paid per barrel on the first 60,000 barrels produced by small brewers. This is estimated to generate $19.9 million in capital for small beer producers, an enormous resource to promote job growth in the craft brewing industry.

...

Now, you don’t have to be a craft brew fan (like me) and you don’t have live in a state that produces many of these craft brews (like me) to get behind something as common sense as this. Unless, of course, all you drink is Bud Light™, which just means you’re a loser with no taste.

via goingconcern.com

Well, then, I'm glad I drink Miller Lite.

Question for micro students:

If the beer tax on craft beers is reduced from $7.00 to $3.50 per barrel, how much would you expect the price of beer paid by consumers to decrease? 

Discuss.