Environmental Economics

Predicting Adaptation to Climate Change using Regional Heterogeneity in Mortality Effects of Temperature

Hi!  I am glad to have gotten an invitation from John to guest-blog here.  I am an Associate Professor of economics at the Andrew Young School at Georgia State University. My research on environmental economics is in solar geoengineering, health effects of air pollution and climate change, behavioral economics, and some other stuff.  I teach environmental economics at the undergraduate and PhD level.

So let me start by highlighting some recent research that I've done with co-authors Nolan Miller and David Molitor of the University of Illinois.  In this article in The Conversation, we describe the results from a recent working paper in which we use claims data from Medicare combined with weather monitor data to estimate 1) the effect of temperature extremes on elderly mortality, 2) how these effects differ across different regions of the country, and 3) the extent to which this can inform us about the effects of climate change and the potential to adapt to climate change.

We summarize our findings on the first question:

Our key finding is that both heat waves and cold snaps increase mortality rates. For example, the mortality rate from a day with average temperatures between 90 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit is higher by about 1 death per 100,000 individuals than a day with an average temperature between 65 and 70 degrees. Deaths also increase, by about one-half per 100,000 individuals, on days when the average temperature is less than 20 degrees.

There is also substantial heterogeneity in these effects across the country (FYI the editors of The Conversation didn't want us to use fancy words like "heterogeneity," but I trust that readers of this blog will be OK with them):

In hot places like Miami, cold days have a very large impact on mortality, while the impact of hot days is smaller. In contrast, hot days in Fargo have a very large impact on mortality, but an additional cold day has little effect. In fact, the effect of the hottest days (90 degrees or higher) in the coldest places is about two to three times larger than the effect of the coldest days (less than 20 degrees) in the hottest places.

Finally, we use the cross-sectional heterogeneity across regions to predict the scope for future climate change adaptation.  Basically, as currently-cold places like Chicago warm up and start to look more like currently-warm places like Miami, climate-wise, those currently-cold places will begin to exhibit the temperature-mortality relationship that currently-warm places currently have. Make sense?

This graph summarizes our predictions on the effects of climate change, depending on whether we allow for regional heterogeneity or not and whether we allow for future adaptation or not.  Ignoring heterogeneity (blue bars) makes it look like climate change will be bad for hot places but actually good for cold places.  (This incidentally is what is presented in this recent study by Solomon Hsiang and co-authors, which got quite a bit of press.) But, once you account for regional heterogeneity (green bars), that's not true anymore - climate change is bad everywhere and even worse for cold places than for hot places.  Lastly, when allowing for adaptation (gray bars), climate change isn't as bad.

As we emphasize in the working paper and in the Conversation article, this doesn't mean that adaptation is a silver bullet that solves all climate change problems.  For one thing, we don't model the costs of adaptation, which could be substantial.  Second, we don't consider other responses to climate change like abatement or geoengineering. 

The two main takeaways are that 1) we need to carefully consider regional heterogeneity when modeling climate change impacts, and 2) we need to carefully consider adaptation when modeling climate change impacts. 

NCEE is hiring

NCEE is hiring (yes, again, but we should be clear of the hiring freeze).

We have permanent positions for research economists focusing on CGE modeling, electricity or energy market modeling, and applied microeconomic analysis and a position for a visiting scholar or postdoc on CGE modeling.

NCEE is a pretty great place to work and I encourage people to apply.

 

Will

This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity.  The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.

 

 

 

Great opportunity--AAAS Fellowships

From my inbox: 

Applications are now being accepted for the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships (STPF). STPF is the premier opportunity for outstanding scientists, social scientists and engineers to learn first-hand about policymaking while contributing their knowledge and analytical skills to address today’s most pressing challenges. Fellows serve yearlong assignments in all three branches of the federal government in Washington, D.C. and represent a broad range of backgrounds, disciplines and career stages.

Join a strong corps of over 3,000 policy-savvy alumni fellows working across sectors to serve the nation and citizens around the world.

The application deadline for the 2018-19 fellowship year is November 1, 2017. Eligibility requirements include U.S. citizenship and a doctoral level degree. Applicants with an M.S. in engineering and three years of professional experience also qualify.

If you had the opportunity to affect policy, what would it be? The possibilities are endless. Hear what fellows had to say.

Learn more about STPF by joining an upcoming live chat or viewing previous chats in the series. Hear directly from fellows and alumni and learn how they’ve been impacting science policy for over 44 years -- and how you can use your STEM background to transform your career. The next live chat is October 12, 2017 at 2:00 p.m. ET. Register here: https://www.aaas.org/event/stpf/chat-series-policy-fellowships-change-world-and-you-4

For more information and to apply, visit the website here: http://www.stpf-aaas.org/?utm_source=listservs&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-Recruitment&utm_content=post1

Please share broadly with your networks.

I shared!

In all seriousness, I've known several Fellows and they've all really enjoyed and gotten a lot out of their experiences. Who is looking for a sabbatical?

Will

 

This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity.  The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.

 

 

Catch shares slow the fisheries frenzy: Some confirmatory evidence

Guest Post by David Kaczan, Anna Birkenbach, and Marty Smith

Economists regularly turn to one famous example when making the case for property rights in fisheries: Alaskan halibut.

In the early 1990s, the halibut derby was madness. At the approved moment, thousands of boats would race each other out of Alaskan harbors. They would spend a short designated period, just a few days, battling dicey weather in the Gulf of Alaska, dropping as many lines as their crew could handle, and filling their holds to the brim. For those who were successful, this race offered the riches of a gold rush. For those left behind, it was an expensive exercise in sleeplessness and danger.

As class after class of natural resource economics students learns, this crazy dash was a classic tragedy of the commons. Fishers competed with each other to secure as much of the catch for themselves as they could. And they were also racing the authorities. As soon as the season’s total allowable catch was reached – often just 24 hours after starting – the fishery was closed to preserve stock for the following year.

Starting in 1994, individual rights to specified proportions of the total allowable catch – “catch shares” – were allocated to fishers. The need to race was mitigated. Today the season is a relatively calm, months-long endeavor.

Not surprisingly, given anecdotes like this, economists have long felt themselves on secure ground when advocating for catch shares in fisheries management. Yet despite wide acceptance, the hypothesis that catch shares slow the race to fish has not been systematically tested across fisheries.

In a paper published in Nature this week, we attempt to fill that gap. Our analysis is broad and conceptually simple: we consider every U.S. fishery that underwent a transition to catch share management and for which monthly data are available (N=39). Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we compare the season length changes in catch share-treated fisheries to those in hand-matched controls – fisheries that did not undergo catch share implementation at the same time.

Many of these catch share fisheries are well known to lovers of American seafood: scallops from the mid-Atlantic, cod from New England, and red snapper from the Gulf of Mexico. Catch share fisheries represent around one third of the total U.S. catch.

The overall picture – the average treatment effect – shows that across the U.S. catch shares work as we expect them to. With fewer incentives to race, seasons lengthen. Fishers take around one extra month on average to bring in the harvest. This is good news: Fresh fish becomes available for longer, bad weather is avoided, overinvestment in gear is mitigated, fish stocks are protected, employment is stabilized, and safety improves dramatically.

To fisheries economists, the result is not surprising. But for the sake of current policy debates, rigorous evidence that the race slows, in fisheries across the country, is timely.

The nation’s primary federal fisheries legislation, The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, is up for reauthorization. Competing amendments currently before Congress highlight the fact that catch shares are far from broad acceptance.  The House’s bill places strong limits on new catch share programs. A competing bill, currently in the Senate, does not. Lawmakers in North Carolina and South Carolina are also moving to restrict new catch shares. While one paper cannot alleviate all the concerns driving these proposed bills, it helps to be able to point to the benefits.

For those already well-versed in the tragedy of the commons, more interesting, perhaps, are the exceptions to the expected result: some seasons actually become more compressed post-catch shares.

We hypothesize that these effects arise due to substitution of effort within multispecies fisheries. Fishers may speed up catch of minor species to leave time for more careful pursuit of other, higher value species. Pinning this down rigorously is the subject of ongoing work.

Another component of ongoing work is the potential effect of catch shares on fishers’ revenues. If the harvest is spread throughout the year, can fishers avoid market gluts, target fresh product markets, and thus get better prices? Frances Homans and James Wilen modeled this more than a decade ago. If broadly supported empirically, it would mean more value from the same fish for communities across the country.

So there’s plenty of work left to do on catch shares, and plenty of challenges in their implementation - but the evidence in favor of these policies’ benefits continues to build.

Plan to Increase Access to Results of EPA-Funded Scientific Research

Speaking of data:

On February 22, 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) directed federal agencies that conduct research to develop plans ensuring peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals and related digital scientific research data resulting from federally-funded scientific research are accessible to the public.  In response, our Plan to Increase Access to Results of EPA-Funded Scientific Research describes the steps EPA will take to meet those directives.  The Plan was finalized on December 5, 2016.  Now that the plan has been completed, we will be working towards implementing it in phases.

• Phase 1 – ORD intramural research publications and related research data effective January 1, 2016.
• Phase 2 – Non-ORD intramural research publications effective during 2017.  Non-ORD intramural research data effective during 2018.
• Phase 3 – All EPA extramural research publications and related data effective with funding agreements completed during 2018.

(Note that the URL in the first line is to EPA's Open Goverment page and the quoted text comes from a text box on that page. I couldn't find a static URL to quote from.)

I think this is great news, especially for replication--it should be a lot easier for researchers to get the data sets necessary for publication. The ability for more people to read publications funded by taxpayer dollars also seems like a really good thing.

The links I had to the original memo and a page with links to the plans from other agencies no longer work (as of today, it appears, I can't imagine why). But for now that information is available at https://www.cendi.gov/projects/Public_Access_Plans_US_Fed_Agencies.html.

 p.s. I could have sworn that either Tim or I posted on this, but I can't find it.

This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity.  The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.

 

This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity.  The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.

This is cool and sad (and I probably shouldn't comment anyway)

According to Wired:

AT 10 AM the Saturday before inauguration day, on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, roughly 60 hackers, scientists, archivists, and librarians were hunched over laptops, drawing flow charts on whiteboards, and shouting opinions on computer scripts across the room. They had hundreds of government web pages and data sets to get through before the end of the day—all strategically chosen from the pages of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—any of which, they felt, might be deleted, altered, or removed from the public domain by the incoming Trump administration.

So it's very cool that people are doing this, but of course sad that they feel like they have to. (I've been teleworking because of the security stuff downtown and won't be able to read the Inside EPA article that Wired cites until I'm back in the office.)

At the other end of the table, Nova Fallen, a Penn computer science grad student, was puzzling over an interactive EPA map of the US showing facilities that violated EPA’s rules.

“There’s a 100,000 limit on downloading these. But it’s just a web form, so I’m trying to see if there’s a Python way to fill out the form programmatically,” said Fallen. Roughly 4 million violations filled the system. “This might take a few more hours,” she said.

I am pretty sure there's an easier way to get that data.

HT: Justin Wolfers

 

This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity.  The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.

NCEE ability to participate in RFAs

This isn't anything new, but I thought it was worth posting.

Economists in the National Center for Environmental Economics, where I work may be able to participate in RFAs from other federal agencies. I am lucky to work with some VERY smart people and maybe you could, too.

Researchers within the National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE) may be willing and available to participate with an eligible institution to prepare a joint assistance application in response to a Request for Application (RFA) issued by another federal agency.  Depending upon the circumstances, EPA may request some of the assistance funding or may be willing to participate as an unfunded collaborator.

Will

p.s. I know the disclaimer is weird in this post, but what are you going to do?

This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity.  The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.

Special Replication Issue of Energy Economics

John has posted a couple of times about replication in economics journal articles. Elsevier, who may be taking the lead in encouraging replication, is putting out a special issue on replication in Energy Economics: 

In this special issue, we will particularly welcome two types of papers, without excluding other forms of replication (Clemens 2015). First, we would like to see replication of older but prominent research. Prominent papers would be ones that are frequently cited or used in policy making. This type of paper would ask whether the old results stand up if newer data are added and methods are brought up to date. If not, why? At the core of this type of contribution would be a table with the original results, the best attempt at replication, and the results with additional data or alternative methods (Reed and Alm 2015). Papers eligible for replication include all economics papers with some relation to energy.

In recent years, Energy Economics has made data and code available for empirical papers. The second type of replication paper we would like to see takes a number of recent articles to check whether the results stand up if all the evidence is put together. For instance, different authors may have worked on the same data with different methods. Can the difference in findings be explained? Is there an objective way to distinguish between more and less credible results? In other cases, different authors may have used similar methods for different data, for example, for different countries, different economic sectors, or different energy sources. What happens to the results if the data are pooled? Again, the replication paper should revolve around a table with original results, replication results, and new results. As above, the replicated papers have to be in economics with some relation to energy. If the majority of replicated papers were published in Elsevier journals, then we will publish a virtual special issue consisting of the replicated paper(s), the replication paper, and the commentaries by the original authors.

And also: 

Besides the special issue, we have created “replication paper” as a new type of submission. Replication will not end with this special issue.

This is, I think, terrific news. Economics desperately needs to be able to publish replications. I don't do any energy work, but good luck to any who submit.

Will

 

This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity.  The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.

Looks like John has some competition

From the AERE website:

AERE is now supporting sessions at the Eastern Ecoomic Association Annual Meetings!  The next meeting is Febuary 23-26, 2017 in New York, NY.  Proposals for full sessions are still being accepted.

Full details are in this pdf. The deadline is January 3rd, so hurry. Kudos to my colleage Kelly Maguire for organizing this.

Will

 

This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity.  The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.

 

NCEE is hiring, too

My office is hiring for one permanent and two temporary positions. Here is the JOE ad for the permanent position, with links to the ORISE opportunities:

Environmental Protection Agency

National Center for Environmental Economics

Research Economist

JOE ID Number: 2016-02_111455809

Date Posted: 08/12/2016

 

Position Title/Short Description

Title: Research Economist
Section: Full-Time Nonacademic
Location: Washington, District of Columbia, UNITED STATES
JEL Classifications:
C1 -- Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General
D -- Microeconomics
Q -- Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics
Q5 -- Environmental Economics
Keywords:

Environmental Economics
Microeconomics and Econometric Modeling
Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics
Behavioral Economics

Salary Range: $77,490-$100,736

 

Full Text of JOE Listing:

The Environmental Protection Agency is recruiting research economists to join its National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE). NCEE's mission is to advance the theory and practice of economics and risk analysis within EPA (www.epa.gov/aboutepa/about-office-policy-op#NCEE). NCEE serves as a center of expertise for cutting-edge policy analysis and research in environmental economics (www.epa.gov/economics).

Applicants should have a completed PhD in economics by August 2017. NCEE economists engage in both fast-paced efforts to apply economic reasoning in real-time regulatory development, and longer-term research projects to inform the Agency's strategic direction. Particular experience of interest: applied evidence-based research including quasi-experimental econometric methods and randomized control trial techniques; behavioral economics; modeling responses of energy and other sectors to environmental regulations using sectoral, CGE, or econometric approaches; and valuation of human health and ecological services.

Full U.S. citizenship required and must be affirmed in application. Salaries competitive. EPA is an equal opportunity employer. Send application questions to [email protected].

Postgraduate ORISE research positions for applicants with CGE and energy sector expertise are also available with NCEE. See:
https://www.zintellect.com/Posting/Details/2637
https://www.zintellect.com/Posting/Details/2466

Informational interviews are planned for the SEA and ASSA meetings. Prefer to receive application materials at least four weeks in advance of the meetings.

This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity.  The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.