I've been doing these annual reviews since 2011. They're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year.  The big new development this year is that together with Johannes Sauer and Eric Yu Sheng I took on the joint editor-in-chief role of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics. My goal, apart from the usual ones of increasing the impact, prestige, and outreach of the journal, is to get more environmental and resource economics papers published in the journal. So, if you have a suitable paper, please send it to us! We star ..read more

Matthew Kahn posted a list of his working assumptions on climate change. I think it is really enlightening to see these laid out rather than just expressed implicitly. So I thought I'd list my ideas in response to each of Matt's points. In the following, Matt's points are in bold and mine in plain text. 1. I believe that global GHG emissions will continue to rise for decades.  Technological change in non-carbon emitting energy technologies has been surprisingly fast despite climate policies having been relatively weak. This makes me optimistic that emissions will soon begin to fall. We u ..read more

  I have a new working paper coauthored with my master's student Suryadeepto Nag on the impact of rural electrification in India. Surya did his master's at IISER in Pune with me as his supervisor. He visited Canberra over the last Southern Summer. This paper is based on part of Surya's thesis. The effect of providing households with access to electricity has been a popular research topic. It's still not clear how large the benefits of such interventions are. Is electricity access an investment that generates growth? Or is it more of a consumption good that growing economies can afford? R ..read more

Today, I gave a seminar in the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics Seminar Series, titled: "Electricity Markets with Speculative Storage and Stochastic Generation and Demand." We hope to post a working paper soon. In the meantime, here's the video * of my seminar:   * Introduction and question time deleted ..read more

I've been doing these annual reviews since 2011. They're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year.    This was the second year since I have been back living in Canberra in 2007 that I spent the entire year in the Canberra region (extending to the coast) and the second year since 1991 that I didn't fly on a plane. I also haven't been outside of Australasia since 2018. It's pretty hard to travel for any length of time without taking the family and with two small children neither of us feels like traveling anywhere very far. I think we ..read more

In August, I showed that using the World Development Indicators' current Adjusted Net Saving (ANS) data there is no relationship between ANS and the share of mining rents in GDP. I now know the main reason why this relationship appeared to change but I don't know yet why the World Bank made the changes that they did.  In 2006 and earlier, the World Bank measured mineral and energy depletion using mining rents – the difference between mining revenues and the cost of production not including a return to the resource stock. This is based on Hartwick's Rule – resource rents should all be inve ..read more

I'm currently teaching Agricultural and Resource Economics for the first time. This week we started covering non-renewable resources focusing on minerals. One of the topics I covered is the resource curse. One of my sources is van den Ploeg's article "Natural Resources: Curse or Blessing?" published in the Journal of Economic Literature in 2011. In the paper, he reproduces this graph from a 2006 World Bank publication that apparently uses 2003 data from the World Development Indicators:   Genuine saving – now known as "adjusted net saving" – is equal to saving minus capital depreciation a ..read more

For the first time in a decade, I updated my spreadsheet on downloads and abstract views per person and per item on RePEc. The downward trends I identified ten years ago have continued, though there was an uptick during the pandemic, which has now dissipated. There was more of an increase in abstract views than in downloads in the pandemic. Since the end of 2011 both abstract views and downloads per paper have fallen by about 80%. Total papers rose by around 260%, while total downloads fell 38% and total abstract views 27%.  I'd guess that a mixture of the explanatory factors I suggest ..read more

I have a new working paper coauthored with Johannes König and Richard Tol. It's a follow up to my 2013 paper in the Journal of Economic Literature, where I computed standard errors for simple journal impact factors for all economics journals and tried to evaluate whether the differences between journals were significant.* In the new paper, we develop standard errors and confidence intervals for recursive journal impact factors, which take into account that some citations are more prestigious than others, as well as for the associated ranks of journals. We again apply these methods to the all e ..read more

I recently gave a seminar in Italy (virtually) on our paper on asymmetric carbon emissions over the business cycle. Here is the video ..read more