Environmental Economics

Tradeable quotas in Virginia fisheries

My students and I will be reading this in the spring semester: 

Nash, Betty Joyce, The Fish Market, Region Focus, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Third Quarter 2011.

I like this picture:

Updating the vita

From the inbox:

Dear Dr. Morgan,

Your article A Split-Sample Revealed and Stated Preference Demand Model to Examine Homogenous Subgroup Consumer Behavior Responses to Information and Food Safety Technology Treatments has just been published and is available as 'Online First' on SpringerLink:

http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1007/s10640-012-9608-9

Here is the cover page:

Picture of the Day

If you are thinking about attending the AERE Summer Conference in Banff, er, don't feed the bears?

Photo Credit: Lynne Lewis and Carol Mansfield

Greg Mankiw's Blog: A Cartoon for the Pigou Club

via gregmankiw.blogspot.com

A shortage in the labor market for economists

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

New job openings for economists increased by 2.7 percent this year over last year, according to the American Economic Association. The increase followed two years of growth that returned the annual number of new jobs to prerecession levels.

An increase in the number of academic jobs fueled this year's growth, with listings for those positions increasing by 5.7 percent, to a total of 2,059 in 2012. At the same time, the number of nonacademic jobs listed fell by 3.6 percent, to 856. Academic institutions continued to be the most-common employer, representing more than two-thirds of the employers listing job openings, according to the association, which based its tallies on its Job Openings for Economists Web page.

The number of new jobs listed for economists has greatly exceeded the number of new Ph.D.'s produced in the field in the United States over the past decade and more, the association said. In 2011, the most recent year for which data were available in both categories, 1,018 new Ph.D.'s were awarded in economics and 2,842 new jobs were listed for economists, according to the association. Annual data the association cited, going back to 2001, showed that in each year there were at least twice as many new jobs as new Ph.D.'s.

Mathematical and quantitative methods was the top field of specialization in the 2012 job listings, the association said, followed by microeconomics and then international economics.

I'm going to be a little cautious about this information. If the plumbers union told you that there was a shortage of plumbers and therefore they should be paid higher wages, what would you think?

Appstate has an ad in JOE this year and we received 200 or so applications. This is in contrast to other acedemic disciplines that might receive 30 or 40 applications for a single job opening. It sure feels like there is a surplus of candidates when you are sorting throught the files. 

An anti-carbon tax pledge?

With the election over, it's nice to get climate policy back in the news:

Conservative groups pressed lawmakers in a Wednesday letter to oppose all proposals to enact a carbon tax.

The organizations pushed back against proposals for a "revenue neutral" carbon tax, a design that some policy experts have floated as a way to win support from fiscal conservatives. That structure would use revenue from taxing emissions to reduce other tax rates or would return that money to consumers.

via thehill.com

Here are the reasons:

1. Carbon taxes are job killers.
2. Promises of revenue neutrality will be broken.
3. Carbon is already taxed high enough.
4. Higher carbon taxes cause environmental harm.
5. Reducing carbon dioxide concentrations in the air causes environmental harm.
6. U.S. carbon dioxide emissions already are declining.
7. Reducing U.S. emissions won’t stop or delay climate change.
8. Global warming fears are overstated.

Here are my quick comments:

1. The letter cites the correlation between energy prices and macro performance, much of which is from OPEC price shocks. Also, more recent literature finds that the correlation is not necessarily causal (at least one way causal). Here is an assertion: A gradual ramping up of a carbon tax will likely kill some fossil fuel jobs but will have positive effects in other energy sectors. My guess is that the overall macro effect would be small. 
2. Agreed. For instance, if carbon tax revenues are needed to reduce government debt and reduce taxes on future generations it might be reasonable to dispense with the revenue neutrality requirement. 
3. The U.S. has the lowest carbon tax among rich countries (fact check needed, should I say one of the lowest?).
4. Because the Tea Party is strongly concerned about endangered bats (filing this argument away in the disingenuity bin).
5. Because the Tea Party is strongly concerned about biodiversity (see above parenthetical).
6. U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are declining because of a severe and prolonged recession (and low natural gas prices). Strong economic growth will reverse this trend (see above parenthetical).
7. If the U.S. pursues a serious climate policy, mechanisms are available to encourage China and India to contribute to the public good. In other words, reducing U.S. emissions might help stop or delay climate change. Alternatively, given the U.S.'s leadership role, increasing U.S. emissions definitely won't stop or delay climate change.
8. The evidence against realized effects of climate change cited is recent (e.g., don't you still need a winter coat?), but climate change is expected way down the road. 

 

They're here*

Cue Carol Anne:

Federal authorities on Wednesday announced that about 1,900 square miles of Atlantic Ocean waters are open for building offshore wind farms, making North Carolina the nation’s new energy hotspot for planting forests of whirling turbines in the high seas.

The U.S. Department of Interior identified a combined sector that’s larger than any such previously designated for hosting the 400-foot turbines. Two of the maritime blocks are between Myrtle Beach and Wilmington, while one lies beyond the Outer Banks, across from Kitty Hawk, Nags Head and Manteo.

A host of developers are expected to express interest, setting the stage for a federal lease auction as early as next year to allow projects to move forward. North Carolina’s ocean waters are considered to have some of the best wind resources along the East Coast. What’s more, the offshore areas picked by the feds have the advantage of being near populated regions with existing transmission capacity and other infrastructure needed to move gigawatts of electricity onto the power grid.

But offshore wind energy remains among the most expensive forms of electricity today, and building a wind farm in the sea has proven an elusive goal in this country. The industry is still distrusted by some as a subsidy-dependent boondoggle, even though advocates depict wind energy as a clean and safe alternative to mining, fracking, energy imports and nuclear waste.

An offshore wind farm long planned in Nantucket Sound off Cape Cod in Massachusetts is tied up in legal challenges, while plans to build one in Delaware waters fell through in recent weeks because of the likely expiration of federal tax incentives for these multibillion dollar projects. ...

One company that expects to file a notice of interest in bidding for leases is Arcadia Offshore, the New Jersey company whose Delaware deal collapsed for lack of subsidies. Arcadia president Peter Mandelstam ...

... acknowledged that with historically low natural gas prices, no utility is likely to buy offshore wind power unless it’s required to do so by state regulators or lawmakers. The argument for investing in wind power is that it’s an emissions-free source of electricity with a fixed price, as opposed to wagering on natural gas, which could spike in price and strand consumers with soaring bills, he said.

via www.newsobserver.com

You can say a lot of things about me, and people do, but one thing people can never say is that I missed an opportunity to suggest you look at some of my research. 

*It has been a long time since we titled a post "A mighty wind" and I almost did it this time, but doesn't the thought of wind turbines in North Carolina send chills down your spine? No? What, are you some sort of hobgoblin?

Climate change and ski season

I was surprised to hear that the local ski resorts had a good 2011-12 season, in spite of the warm winter:

Whether this winter turns out to be warm or cold, scientists say that climate change means the long-term outlook for skiers everywhere is bleak. The threat of global warming hangs over almost every resort, from Sugarloaf in Maine to Squaw Valley in California. As temperatures rise, analysts predict that scores of the nation’s ski centers, especially those at lower elevations and latitudes, will eventually vanish.

Under certain warming forecasts, more than half of the 103 ski resorts in the Northeast will not be able to maintain a 100-day season by 2039, according to a study to be published next year by Daniel Scott, director of the Interdisciplinary Center on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

By then, no ski area in Connecticut or Massachusetts is likely to be economically viable, Mr. Scott said. Only 7 of 18 resorts in New Hampshire and 8 of 14 in Maine will be. New York’s 36 ski areas, most of them in the western part of the state, will have shrunk to 9. ...

The most basic strategy for coping with a lack of snow is to make it, and as of the 2009-10 season, 88 percent of resorts belonging to the National Ski Areas Association were doing so. Improvements in snow-making technology have helped resorts compensate for warming trends, and several have invested millions in new energy-efficient tower guns.

via www.nytimes.com

I hesitated to post this since we were scooped by Kahn, who points out:

1. the lack of skiing opportunities is not a huge concern on the demand side of the market as there are a number of alternative activities in the choice set
2. snow making is an important adaptation strategy

Ah, a chink in the armor of the google

Digitopoly:

Google Scholar works via algorithm. It examines papers that are hosted in certain domains (usually, publishers and higher education institutions) and then constructs citations based on those papers. As it is easily accessible and also includes citations from unpublished papers, Google Scholar is becoming increasingly popular as a key metric for academic performance.

A new paper by Emilio Delgado López-Cózar, Nicolás Robinson-García, and Daniel Torres-Salinas posted to arXiv demonstrates who easy it is to manipulate Google Scholar citations ...

It is an interesting question as to whether we should expect Google to be so hands off. After all, they are in the information retrieval business and if the information is being compromised, it would be in their interests to do something about it. And one can imagine certain correlations with published citations might yield some results. In the meantime, faculty at tenure-review or promotion time should have their citations examined under closer scrutiny.

Just when you thought you could take the blue pill.

Just sayin'

I was thinking of writing a lengthy post about climate change denial being completely unscientific nonsense, but then geochemist and National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell wrote a post that is basically a slam-dunk of debunking. His premise was simple: If global warming isn’t real and there’s an actual scientific debate about it, that should be reflected in the scientific journals.

He looked up how many peer-reviewed scientific papers were published in professional journals about global warming, and compared the ones supporting the idea that we’re heating up compared to those that don’t. What did he find? This:

The thin red wedge.   

Image credit: James Lawrence Powell

via www.slate.com