Environmental Economics

One of the greatest failures of university economics departments ...

... is our passivity when our employers erect monopolies on campus to exploit students:

The rise of online textbook retailers such as Chegg, Amazon, and Half.com, has put official college and university bookstores on the defensive. Once the default source of course materials, campus bookstores run by Barnes & Noble and Follett are responding to the pressure by cracking down on competitors’ on-campus advertising, which bookstores contend violates their exclusivity contracts with colleges.

Chegg is a nine-year-old company that offers textbook rentals and sales, along with tutoring and career services. It has irked campus officials and bookstore managers with its marketing techniques, which include recruiting students as brand ambassadors, slipping free Red Bull and Starbucks products into book-delivery packages, and buying back books on the campus, often for more money than the bookstore offers.

The company has received dozens of cease-and-desist letters, according to its president, Dan Rosensweig, but it has no plans to scale back its efforts.

"There’s no legal basis for it, and we’ve never been sued," Mr. Rosensweig said. The aggressive tactics have helped bring rapid growth to the company, which couches its arguments in populist terms. "Everything we can be doing to help kids save money and time, we should," Chegg’s chief executive argued. "The school should not be working against the interest of the student financially."

via chronicle.com

It is rare to find an economist who thinks that competition isn't a good thing. 

I'd like to teach the world to sing

This is outrageous, probably part of some Reagan-era Department of Interior program:

As part of an effort to provide equal opportunities across habitats and enrich the lives of wildlife throughout the nation, officials from the EPA unveiled a new biodiversity program Friday that will bus in species from different ecosystems. “We are firmly committed to creating a diverse biosphere by fostering relationships between flora and fauna with unique experiences and perspectives,” agency spokesman Adam Wilson said of the federally funded program, which launched this week by shuttling two dozen species of plants and animals from the Everglades to the northern Great Plains. “Before these exchanges, many fir trees in the Colorado Rockies, for example, might go their entire lives without ever meeting a clam. But soon, they’ll be able to live together in harmony and gain a new understanding of their different backgrounds and biomes.” ...

And no, I wasn't aware that this is from The Onion.

 

Marine Resource Economics, Vol. 29, No. 3, September 2014

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Editorial
   1. 

      Barbara Harrison MRE Editorial Assistant and Technical Editor 1998–2014(p. 199)  

      James Anderson, Cathy Roheim, and Marty Smith

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677768
2. Articles
   1. 

      Increasing Pressure on Unregulated Species Due to Changes in Individual Vessel Quotas: An Empirical Application to Trawler Fishing in the Baltic Sea(pp. 201-217)  

      Barbara Hutniczak

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677760
   2. 

      Dynamic Reallocation of Marketable Nitrogen Emission Permits in Danish Freshwater Aquaculture(pp. 219-239)  

      Rasmus Nielsen, Jesper Levring Andersen, and Peter Bogetoft

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677758
   3. 

      On the Statistical Significance of Regional Economic Impacts from Recreational Fishing Harvest Limits in Southern Alaska(pp. 241-257)  

      Daniel K. Lew and Chang K. Seung

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677759
   4. 

      Hedonic Pricing of Atlantic Cod: Effects of Size, Freshness, and Gear(pp. 259-277)  

      Min-Yang Lee

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677769
3. Perspectives
   1. 

      Analysis of South African Commercial Traditional Linefish Snoek Value Chain(pp. 279-299)  

      Mafaniso M. Hara

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677770

via www.jstor.org

I'm 58% to blame for all mistakes on this blog

A federal judge has ruled that BP's reckless conduct resulted in the nation's worst offshore oil spill, leaving the company open to billions of dollars in penalties.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier's ruling Thursday could nearly quadruple the amount of civil penalties for polluting the Gulf of Mexico with oil from BP's Macondo well in 2010.

Barbier presided over a trial in 2013 to apportion blame for the spill that spewed oil from April 20 to mid-July 2010. Eleven men died when the well blew wild; BP already has agreed to billions of dollars in criminal fines.

Barbier says BP bears 67 percent of the blame for the spill. He says drilling rig owner Transocean Ltd. takes 30 percent of the blame, and cement contractor Halliburton Energy Service takes 3 percent.

via news.yahoo.com

Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change cameo appearance by John and Tim

The environmental economics blog invested some of our hard-earned money in the Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change's Kickstarter campaign. 

We definitely wanted a cameo and we got it on page 106 (I think I'm the guy with the gray hair):

Tim: I recently discovered your copy of the book at the bottom of a pile on my desk. I'll send it ASAP!

Cherry, Garcia (et al.)

It is not just a Ben & Jerry's flavor:

"10 Things Every College Professor Hates"

My favorite reply to this one is "Listen, I'm not joking. This is my job!":

3. Don’t pack up your things as the class is ending.

We get it. The minute hand is closing in on the end of class, there’s a shift in the instructor’s voice, and you hear something like “For next time …” That’s the cue for the students to start putting their stuff away. Once one person does it, it’s like an avalanche of notebooks slapping closed, backpack zippers zipping, and cell phones coming out.

Don’t do it.

Just wait 10 more seconds until the class is actually over. If you don’t, it makes it seem as if you are dying to get out of there and, hey, that hurts our feelings!

via www.businessinsider.com

Hat tip: Newmark's Door

Tautology?

On the Faculty Senate's agenda for September is a "Resolution on the Status of Resolutions."

Aguanomics: Happy birthday to me -- here's a gift for you!

David Zetland:

A few months ago, I was going back and forth on pricing Living with Water Scarcity, i.e., finding a balance between cheap (more sales) and expensive (more revenue). That debate was complicated by the (real or imaged) ideas that higher prices mean more value or a greater obligation to read for some people at the same time as non-zero prices create a barrier for people who lack credit cards, doubt the book's value, or have plenty of "free" stuff to read.

I've been thinking over these issues over the past few months, and I've decided to lower the PDF price from $5 to free because revenues to me are not as important as getting this book into people's hands and its ideas into their heads.

To get your copy, click here

I hope that people who download the book will read it, recommend it to others, and review it on Amazon, their blogs, facebook, and other websites. More important, I hope that my book helps readers and leaders engage in fruitful debates that improve water policies in their communities

via www.aguanomics.com

There goes the demand and supply for jocks easy econ-A

This is a good thing:

Tar Heels in search of the easy A, beware. Starting this fall, UNC-Chapel Hill transcripts will provide a little truth in grading.

From now on, transcripts for university graduates will contain a healthy dose of context.

Next to a student’s grade, the record will include the median grade of classmates, the percentile range and the number of students in the class section. Another new measure, alongside the grade point average, is the schedule point average. A snapshot average grade for a student’s mix of courses, the SPA is akin to a sports team’s strength of schedule.

The nuanced transcripts will provide more information for graduate schools and employers, who should be better able to judge the difference between good and excellent performance. An A- in psychology might not look so swell when the average grade in the class is an A. On the other hand, an A- in physics looks downright impressive if the class average is a C+.

The new contextual transcript is the university’s response to grade inflation – the long-term trend of rising grades that began in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1980s. ...

Andrew Perrin, a sociology professor at UNC-CH, said the [grade inflation] system provides a perverse incentive for students to seek courses not because of intellectual interests or career aspirations, but to pad their GPAs. Popular sites such as Rate My Professors include a measure of “easiness” for each faculty member.

Anything less than an A is unacceptable for some students.

“Elite universities, both elite state universities like ours or elite private universities, face a particular challenge, which is that everybody here is used to being the best,” Perrin said. “And in many cases, they’re used to complaining if they’re not the best.”

via www.newsobserver.com

At elite regional comprehensive state universities or elite community colleges, professors face a particular challenge, which is that not everybody here is used to being the best and they don't complain if they're not the best. They especially don't complain if you explain to them that this is a college course and not everyone is going to get an A.