Open PhD position in Graz

August 14, 2018
open positions
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Could you please forward this job opening as “University Assistant“  to potential PhD candidates which is basically a fully funded post (4 years) associated with pursuing a PhD in Economics.

http://jobs.uni-graz.at/en/MB/138/99/

Thank you very much!

Professor Dr Michael Finus

Professor in Climate and Environmental Economics
Department of Economics
University of Graz

 

Mitigation versus adaptation

June 21, 2018
adaptation, climate change, mitigation
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In the paper “Climate Policy Must Favour Mitigation Over Adaptation”, I develop the argument that the world must prefer mitigation to adaptation at the global level. The argument rests on the observation that mitigation is a public good while adaptation is a private one. I have the feeling that the academic literature has completely missed this point, and especially the representative agent literature, but also integrated assessment models that introduce adaptation and mitigation.

Read on for more details, why I have trouble to get this published in a journal, the referees’ comments and my rebuffals.

Read More

New publication: The Aggregation Dilemma in Climate Change Policy Evaluation

June 13, 2018
climate change, new publication, Uncategorized
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I am happy to announce that my article entitled “The Aggregation Dilemma in Climate Change Policy Evaluation” has been accepted for publication in the journal Climate Change Economics.

The article deals with the following question:

We show that a policy maker who ignores regional data and instead relies on aggregated integrated assessment models is likely underestimating the carbon price and thus the required climate policy. Based on a simple theoretical model we give conditions under which the Aggregation Dilemma is expected to play a role in climate change cost-benefit analysis. We then study the importance of the Aggregation Dilemma with the integrated assessment model RICE (Nordhaus, 2000).
Aggregating all regions of the RICE-99 model into one region yields a 40% lower social cost of carbon than the RICE model itself predicts. Based on extrapolating the results a country-level integrated assessment model would give a more than eight times higher social cost of carbon compared to a fully aggregated model. We suggest that these tentative results require researchers to re-think the aggregation level used in integrated assessment models and to develop models at much lower levels of aggregation than currently available.

Here is the article if you are interested: pdf

2-year postdoctoral position in Economics

April 19, 2018
open positions, Uncategorized
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Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMSE) and Center for Environmental Economics in Montpellier (CEE-M) invite applications for a 2-year, fully-funded postdoctoral position in Economics, with an emphasis on Economics of risk and uncertainty and Environmental economics. They are mainly interested in candidates specializing in Behavioral economics and/or Contract theory. The postdoctoral researcher will join a team to work on the research projects GREEN-Econ (Transition Toward a GREENer Economy: Environmental Policies and Societal Adaptation) and Green-Society (Toward a greener
economy: behavioral and societal adaptations to environmental changes),

More information available here: Post-doctoral_Position_2018

The monster that is advertisement

April 13, 2018
#ProvocativeThoughts, overconsumption
2 Comments
I’ve been looking at a hotel on booking.com for a conference. Incidently, a friend of mine looked at the same hotel for this conference. Now facebook informs me that this friend of mine has also been looking at the same hotel.
Isn’t this just great? Look how helpful those advertisement companies are. Maybe I’d have never met him there.
Incidently, what facebook and co apparently didn’t know is that I did a joint booking, a room for my friend and one for myself.
For some reason, my friend’s google agenda has already put this event in my friend’s calendar. And the only thing I passed to booking.com is my friend’s name.
So booking.com gives information to some advertisement company that shares this information through facebook, and it also provides information to google.com. Wow. Isn’t the internet a great place nowadays?
And seriously, all this fuzz about facebook sharing user data with some company that used this in the US election? That is simply the tip of an iceberg.
Face it: There is no regulation on the internet. There is no anonymity. Advertisement companies are exploiting everything you do. Facebook and co. are living off that.
As an economist I can only tell you: put your money in advertisement companies. Governments don’t seem to want to regulate these, and this is cleary where all the business is. After all, all the big companies are investing significant and increasing shares of their earnings on advertisement. Coca Cola spends roughly four billion USD annually on advertisement. Four billion USD. In one year. On advertisement. More than the annual development aid of most European countries. A company does this. A single company.
And so it doesn’t surprise me that everyone is constantly buying all this crap, these gimmicks, widgets and gadgets. You can erroneously claim that you may be immune to advertising, but in all honesty your are not. And why should you be? Why should you be the only one that is immune? What makes you different?
And if you still believe that you are not affected by advertisement, then look around you. What stuff do you own? What things do you really need? Which ones do you really use? Where do you eat? What do you eat? What do you drive? What clothes do you wear? How big is your house/flat? How many clothes do you have and how many do you actually wear? And so on…
The moral of this story? I would say that we need two discourses on advertisement. One, which is more fundamental: Do we really need advertisement? If I know what I need then I go into a specialized shop to buy it. And only it. And that’s it. I don’t need advertisement to tell me about all these products which are out there that I don’t need right now. However, what about products that I don’t know about now but may find useful anyway? This is informative advertisement. It would be useful as long as it simply informs me. Forget all the packaging stuff, all the plastic wrapping that has nothing to do with the product and only makes it look good so you are induced to buy it. One should buy a product for the product’s sake and not because the packaging is nice. You are anyway going to throw it away in the moment you unpacked it.
Two, should we allow preference-changing advertisement? This is entirely different to the previous advertisement. In the former case you are informed about the existence of product, in the later case you are induced into believing a product is useful for you. That’s simply messing with your mind. Most of the advertisement out there is preference-changing advertisement. And of course it works. Otherwise all these companies wouldn’t invest in it. You’ll buy, and it’ll just end in some corner of your flat. But you bought it, and the wheels kept turning… Your money is now someone’s else money, and the only difference is that you’ll need to buy a new cupboard to hold all the additional stuff that you bought and will never use. And this is where Walmart jumps in.  Walmart spends annually 2.4 billion USD on advertisement. And so it goes.

Subconference in Environmental Economics

March 19, 2018
conference, conferences
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We warmly invite you to submit your paper for presentation in the Subconference on Environmental Economics, organized by Ingmar Schumacher (IPAG Business School), Eric Strobl (University of Bern, Switzerland), and Cees Withagen (IPAG Business School and VU University, Amsterdam, Netherlands) at the 9th International Research Meeting in Business and Management that will take place on 5-7th  July 2018 in Nice, France. We welcome both theoretical and empirical contributions on environmental economics and resource and energy economics, with emphasis on climate change economics; green growth; welfare, discounting and sustainable development; uncertainty and irreversibilities in dynamic resource use; the nexus between population, economic growth and the environment; environmental policy; as well as empirical studies that focus on economic aspects of the environment.

The keynote lectures will be held by Knut Einar Rosendahl (School of Economics and Business, Norwegian University of Life Science, Norway) and  Nicolas Treich (Toulouse School of Economics, France).

Only papers in English are considered. They must be submitted electronically at

http://ipag-irm.sciencesconf.org/. Please choose the Topic “Subconference in Environmental Economics”.

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for paper submissions: April 8, 2018

Notification of acceptance/rejection: May 4, 2018

Registration deadline: June 4, 2018

Conference event: July 5-7, 2018

 

FURTHER INFORMATION

For queries, please contact the organizer at Ingmar.schumacher@ipag.fr, or ipag-irm@sciencesconf.org

Conference: Ecological-Economic Resilience of Ecosystems

February 8, 2018
conferences
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The « Ecological-Economic Resilience of Ecosystems » symposium will focus on the concept of resilience for the quantitative analysis and management of ecosystems. Resilience, which is often related to sustainability and vulnerability, describes the ability of a system to cope with shocks arising from natural or anthropogenic events such as climatic catastrophes, pollution, financial crisis or epidemics. The intrinsic complexity of these ecosystems and socio-ecosystems at the interface of human dynamics and natural dynamics requires interdisciplinary approaches and in particular an ecological-economic viewpoint.
In this context, the symposium will pay particular attention to the following applications: Marine or coastal ecosystems, water resources, agrosystems and viticulture, forest ecosystems and heath systems. The symposium intends to give major insights into the following issues: How to quantify ecological-economic resilience? What are its drivers? Which strategies and public policies can improve this resilience?
The interdisciplinary symposium will bring together economists, ecologists, epidemiologists, and mathematicians. Keynote lectures will be given by internationally recognized researchers in the field:
Stefan Baumgärtner (Germany),
Quentin Grafton (Australia),
Michel Loreau (France).
You are invited to submit a full paper in English before February 18th, 2018. All Submissions have to be sent to: emmanuelle.augeraud@u-bordeaux.fr
Scientific committee :
Cécile Aubert (GREThA et TSE)
Emmanuelle Augeraud-Véron (GREThA)
Luc Doyen (GREThA)
Sylvie Ferrari (GREThA)
Charles Figuières (GREQAM – AMSE).
François Salanié (INRA – TSE)
 You will find more information on the FAERE website : https://faere.fr/en/news-events/conferences-workshops/

The GREThA, in collaboration with the University of Bordeaux, CNRS, and FAERE, organizes an interdisciplinary symposium dedicated to the resilience of ecosystems.

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