Output in the Inbox

From the inbox:

The Springer Marketing Team congratulates you on the publication of your article Superfund, Hedonics, and the Scales of Environmental Justice in the following paginated issue of Environmental Management: Volume 44, Issue 5 (2009), Page 909. This information can be used for full citation of your article. Please also add your article’s DOI in the citation information in order to enable readers to find your article in print and online.

The article is also available electronically on SpringerLink: http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1007/s00267-009-9372-y. We encourage you to forward this email to your co-authors and colleagues.

It’s my pleasure to do a favor for the guys in marketing.   You can also just download the paper directly here.  Now that’s doing them a favor.

 

Polling economists

Despite frequently and intensively using survey data, economists tend to favor behavioral rather than survey data in part because people’s remarks might not reflect behavior or “truth” too well.  Think their attitudes change if the survey is of economists?

 

Nobel cause

This year’s “Nobel Prize” in economics goes to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, two scholars near-and-dear to my own world.  I met Lin Ostrom at a conference on managing the commons, a year before I entered grad school, and I’ve been using her stuff in my own book and classes ever since.  Nice to see her get the award.  Speculation that it might go to someone environmental or climate-related was not terribly unfounded, as Ostrom’s (and Williamson’s) highly influential work is almost certain to shape how we establish international institutions to govern climate change, water, and biodiversity — not to mention more local initiatives to do likewise.

 

Classified or just peer-reviewed?

Classifying different types of publications is a mess, really.  It is the kind of mess that is terribly important to academics, however.  “Peer-reviewed” can mean different things at different times to different people.  Some definitions require a peer-reviewed publication to be reviewed by experts other than the volume editor(s), by more than one referee, by anonymous reviewers, be unsolicited or submitted anonymously, be in an outlet classified as “peer-reviewed” by ISI’s Web of Science, or some combination of one or more of those criteria.  I wish it were simpler.

 

Rantings of cap-n-trade

• First lesson:  don’t blog.  (Or, at least don’t blog professionally.)
• Second lesson:  try to temper your venom, especially if it’s politically motivated or if you’re going to make mistakes.

In Prof. Paul Krugman’s case, he seems to have ignored these lessons.  Today, I will ignore the first one.  Hopefully not the second.

For background, read these:

• “It’s Easy Being Green” – Paul Krugman’s op-ed in the NYTimes on 9/24/09.
• “Pigou, Glenn Beck, and the False Case Against Cap-and Trade” – Paul Krugman’s NYTimes.com blog posting on 9/25/09.
• “The Textbook Economics of Cap-and-Trade” – Paul Krugman’s NYTimes.com blog posting on 9/27/09.
• Maybe these additional brief commentaries at the Environmental Economics blog here and at the Energy Collective blog here.

 

A whale of a tale

This video was shared with me a long time ago.  I’m not sure what lessons to draw (other than: don’t watch this with a sensitive stomach), but there’s gotta’ be something in here about preservation, bureaucracy, or decisions under uncertainty.  Enjoy?

 

Smoking bans

Smoking bans are “clean indoor air laws” have long fascinated me.  Getting convincing evidence about the behavioral, health, and policy angles of it all is a difficult (and important) challenge.  From my inbox this week comes news a new NBER working paper:

 

From the inbox: Taxes and environmental regulation

The August 2009 issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy just hit my inbox.  Some papers that I’d like to read, someday, time permitting…  Interesting stuff from Fowlie on environmental leakage (i.e., what happens when you regulate only some of the polluters, such as what happens when California regulates CO2 from only in-state producers), Li et al. on gas taxes show the short- and long-run impacts on fleet fuel economy (SR elasticity of 0.022, LR elasticity of .204), and Ellison et al. on shoppers’ preferences for out-of-state e-retail firms given state sales tax for offline purchases.

 

Diet COLA for all?

I see this article courtesy of the Association Press, and it gets picked up by everyone on the web, and the headline reads:  “Millions Face Shrinking Social Security Payments.”  Ouch.  That sounds like bad news for them.  Except that the article’s second paragraph calmly states, “By law, Social Security benefits cannot go down.” 

 

Killer London smog?

Also in the Inbox recently is this paper by Janke et al.  They ask “Do current levels of air pollution kill? The impact of air pollution on population mortality in England,” and I’m dying to know the answer.