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Pastimes : Trading the markets..... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (2625)	1/12/2001 9:19:16 PM
From: Moominoid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4583

Thanks I don't do experiments. I use data collected by someone else. Whether it is cattle numbers in Botswana, data from ice cores on atmospheric composition, US GDP, sulfur emissions etc. I think I am successful when my research helps change opinion in scientific or policy debates. For example, my most cited paper is basically a critique of the World Bank's 1992 World Development Report which focused on the environment. We use their own assumptions and show how the results just don't hold together when you do the numbers. It was the simplest paper I ever wrote in terms of the work involved. We were one of a couple of people who started criticizing this concept called the environmental Kuznets curve. There has been a lot more debate about the validity of the idea that general economic growth is necessary to reduce pollution as a result. Subsequent papers have tried to trash the econometrics used by others even more and also to try to calculate the contribution of different factors to the total pollution reduction which in some countries has been impressive. On the other hand the energy demand study my student did for his PhD uses previously unpublished data to estimate a system of demand equations. There are lots of models out there used to assess the impact of taxes or climate change policy on the economy. When they don't have an elasticity estimate they just stick any number in. Often they'll just stick US numbers into an Australian model. In the paper we compare the results to North American ones. Hopefully those guys in future might use our estimates instead. My student has been offered a job by one of the main energy/resource forecasting outfits here - a quasi-government agency called ABARE. He's just trying to sort out his immigration papers - from Pakistan. I could give more examples :) David