Environmental Economics

Quote of the Day: Freedom Fries the Redux

Ladies and gentleman, an actual press release from the Department of Energy (with EMPHASIS ADDED): 

“Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy. Further, more exports of U.S. LNG to the world means more U.S. jobs and more domestic economic growth and cleaner air here at home and around the globe,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes, who highlighted the approval at the Clean Energy Ministerial in Vancouver, Canada. “There’s no doubt today’s announcement furthers this Administration’s commitment to promoting energy security and diversity worldwide.”

“Approval of additional LNG exports from Freeport LNG furthers this Administration’s commitment to promoting American energy, American jobs, and the American economy. Further, increased supplies of U.S. natural gas on the world market are critical to advancing clean energy and the energy security of our allies around the globe. With the U.S. in another year of record-setting natural gas production, I am pleased that the Department of Energy is doing what it can to promote an efficient regulatory system that allows for molecules of U.S. freedom to be exported to the world,” said Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Steven Winberg, who signed the export order and was also in attendance at the Clean Energy Ministerial.

I was going to make a joke about spreading molecules of gas wherever I go, but then I thought that might be beneath me.

And this blog could very well be exhibits A, B, and C...case closed.

Ummm...this:

"People are getting dumber. That's not a judgment; it's a global fact. In a host of leading nations, IQ scores have started to decline."

Quote of the Day: Global Heating? Climate Crisis?

The Guardian has indicated that it is changing its guidelines for writing about climate change:  

“We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” said the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. “The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”

   

 

Abstract Monday: Correcting On-Site Sampling Bias

Today's entry in Abstract Monday is a little technical, but it's a problem I've been interested in for a long time, and it looks like my and John's former colleague, Ju-Chin Huang*, and co-author have found an improvement (if not solution).  If I ever get around to writing a second edition of my nonmarket valuation econometrics book, this is definitely going to be in there.

*I'm sure John will agree, Ju-Chin was the smartest of the three of us.

 

Title: Correcting On-Site Sampling Bias: A New Method with Application to Recreation Demand Analysis

Author(s): Wei Shi and Ju-Chin Huang

Journal: Land Economics, 2018, 94(3): 459-474

Objective: A new method for dealing with truncation and endogenous stratification in on-site sampling of recreational site users.

 

Background: Assessing recreational site use can involve random samples of the general population, random sample of subsamples of users (e.g. boat owners), or on-site sample of current visitors.  While convenient, and often less expensive, on-site samples of current visitors introduce modeling challenges due to truncation (no non-users are sampled), and endogenous stratification (the probability of interviewing an avid visitor is higher--sometimes called avidity bias).  Both biases have puzzled recreation demand models for decades and the literature is still fraught with examples of misunderstanding and confusion about the correct way to handle on-site sampling. Most past studies have tried to simultaneously solve both problems, but such solutions depend critically on the assumed statistical distribution of trips.  Separating the issue of stratification from truncation may provide recreation demand estimates that are less sensitive to distributional assumptions. 

 

Methods: Shi and Huang first correct endogenous stratification by weighting the assumed expected number of trips taken, after truncation at zero, by the inverse of the observed number of trips.  This weighting effectively 'scales down' the probability of interviewing those who take large number of trips, creating a sample that more closely mimics the likelihood of a sample drawn from the general population.  The weighted sample is then used to estimate a truncated count data model, thereby separating the issue of truncation from the issue of endogenous stratification.

 

Results and Conclusions:  Using simulations and a case study, Shi and Huang demonstrate that the distribution free re-weighting approach to on-site sampling reduces the sensitivity of results to the researcher-assumed distribution of trips.    

AERE 2019 Summer Conference

The schedule of papers for the AERE 2019 Summer Conference is now online (just in time!)

Lots of good papers!  Not sure which sessions I will attend, but I will do my best to attend the session that I am presenting in.

A great job opportunity for an undergraduate economics student (deadline May 28)

Assessing the Benefits & Costs of Environmental Policies that Improve Water Quality: 

A research training opportunity is currently available at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Policy (OP)/National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE), located at EPA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

The participant will be involved with NCEE economists on a research project that will improve methodologies to assess the benefits and costs of environmental policies that improve water quality. This project will have two components. The first component involves assessing the validity and reliability of studies that estimate social benefits of improving outdoor water quality. The participant will engage in research efforts to review literature of all relevant studies, evaluate the results of published validity and reliability tests, and conduct additional retrospective evaluation tests on results, making use of raw survey data where available. The second component is an evaluation of affordability metrics for costs of drinking water that are passed on to customers. The participant will engage in research efforts to review literature on proposed affordability metrics (including those for similar services, such as electricity), apply these metrics to existing market data and evaluate their performance. This research project will provide the participant the opportunity to be involved with large, administrative data sets. The participant will also have the opportunity to participate in additional research projects that are mutually beneficial.

The mentor for this opportunity is Chris Moore ([email protected]).

This program, administered by ORAU through its contract with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to manage the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE), was established through an interagency agreement between DOE and EPA. The initial appointment is for one year, but may be renewed upon recommendation of EPA contingent on the availability of funds. The participant will receive a monthly stipend commensurate with educational level and experience. No funding will be made available to cover travel costs for interviews, relocation costs, costs of tuition/school fees, or a participant's health insurance. Proof of health insurance is required for participation in this program. The appointment is full-time at EPA in the Washington, DC, area. Participants do not become employees of EPA, DOE or the program administrator, and there are no employment-related benefits.

Qualifications

The qualified candidate should have received a bachelor's or master's degree (preferred) in one of the relevant fields. Degree must have been received within five years of the appointment start date. 

Preferred skills:

• • Experience using analytic software (e.g., STATA, R or Matlab) 
  • Strong quantitative skills
  • Understanding of benefit-cost or economic impact analyses

I wish my benefit-cost analysis students from last fall would stop by so that I could say "I told you so." 

A new journal: Series of Unsurprising Results in Economics

Kelsey Piper at Vox (This economics journal only publishes results that are no big deal):

Start with the name: Series of Unsurprising Results in Economics (SURE). The journal publishes papers with findings that are, well, really boring — so boring that other journals rejected them just for being boring. Its first paper, published Tuesday, is about an education intervention that was found to have no effects at all on anything.

But before you close this tab, hear me out. SURE is actually far from boring, even if the papers it publishes are guaranteed to be, as the name implies, unsurprising. In fact, it’s a pretty big deal, and a significant step toward fixing a major problem with scientific research.

SURE exists to fight “publication bias,” which affects every research field out there. Publication bias works like this: Let’s say hundreds of scientists are studying a topic. The ones who find counterintuitive, surprising results in their data will publish those surprising results as papers.

The ones who find extremely standard, unsurprising results — say, “This intervention does not have any effects,” or, “There doesn’t seem to be a strong relationship between any of these variables” — will usually get rejected from journals, if they bother turning their disappointing results into a paper at all.

That’s because journals like to publish novel results that change our understanding of the field. Null results (where the researchers didn’t find anything) or boring results (where they confirm something we already know) are much less likely to be published. And efforts to replicate other people’s papers often aren’t published, either, because journals want something new and different. ...

 If you conducted a rigorous study but journals find your result too boring to publish, SURE will publish it. The hope is that this will fix the incentives for the whole field. More null results will get published, mitigating publication bias. Researchers can get a paper published even if they found null or unexciting results, which should discourage scouring their data for unreliable results.

If SURE works, hopefully it’ll be emulated — economics isn’t the only field that needs it. While exciting results get headlines, it’s the boring results that often do the most to add to our knowledge of the world. Those boring results deserve a journal of their own.

Funny story. A co-author was presenting one of our papers at a conference. The paper has an interesting result that has not appeared in the literature before. The result is intuitive and it advances what we know incrementally. The kind of result that gets published in a second-tier journal. At the end of the presentation an audience member offered the very unhelpful, wasting time to hear himself (of course, it's a guy) speak comment: "I don't find it surprising that [results our paper]". As if, surprise is the goal of research. Now, maybe surprise is the goal if you are aiming at the top journals and a big surprising result is the only way that you can hit those journals, but if you are one of the rank and file trying to sincerely advance knowledge in your niche the incremental result is what you are after. So, I think this journal is a great idea. And I'm still steaming about what that guy tried to do to my co-author. 

And don't get me started on trying to get replication papers published ... I'll write that post another day.

Quote of the Day: Hayek the prognosticator

Somehow seems appropriate (and ironic):

"In principle the industrial protectionism and government-supported cartels and agricultural policies of the conservative groups are not different from the proposals for a more far-reaching direction of economic life sponsored by the socialists."

 F.A. Hayek, page 107 , Individualism and Economic Order, 1947

Hat Tip to Brad Gentner for finding this one

Daily Demand and Supply: Bill Nye Explains the Law of Demand...and Carbon Pricing, MFers.

Warning:  NSFW (Unless you work at a University and part of your job is to watch stuff like this and post it on a blog).

The highlights of this have been around all week, but most of the clips are just Bill Nye the Science Guy saying "motherf***ers.   But this segment on Last Week Tonight really does a nice job of simply explaining how Carbon Pricing works.  If you don't want to watch the whole thing, just fastforward to the 9:27 mark or so, and sit back and enjoy.

Bill Nye explains the Law of Demand from 10:21 to 10:37.

Now if I can just figure out how to use this in class without trigger warnings.

Graphic of the Day: I'm just going to leave this here while I wipe my tears...