1,720,982 research outputs found
Natural Climate Solutions: Essays on Climate Mitigation in Agriculture, Forestry, and Land Use
Get PDFPolicy makers around the world have recognized the role that agriculture, forestry, and land use can play in addressing climate change. These sectors are a growing source of greenhouse gases (GHGs), emitting one quarter of global anthropogenic GHG emissions annually. However, global integrated assessment models estimate that enhancing natural land-based CO2 sinks, avoiding deforestation, and using bioenergy to avoid fossil fuel use could provide nearly one third of GHG abatement required to avoid the most extreme impacts of climate change. Through dedicated management and preservation, natural and managed landscapes can remove CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, storing carbon in trunks, branches, roots, soils, and detritus for decades and even centuries.Yet outside the confines of optimization models, federal, state, and local policy makers are often unsure how to efficiently deploy natural climate solutions, given the many markets, laws, landowners, and natural systems that influence net GHG outcomes and the potential for negative impacts to ecosystems and social welfare. In this dissertation, I provide three essays that inform natural climate solutions policy, accounting for important sources of real-world complexity.
• Chapter 1. Addressing uncertainty and bias in land use, land use change, and forestry greenhouse gas inventories. National GHG inventories (NGHGIs) are the primary tool for tracking anthropogenic GHG emissions for individual countries, sectors, and sources. I propose an analytical framework for implementing the uncertainty provisions of the UN Paris Agreement Enhanced Transparency Framework, with a view to identifying the largest sources of land use, land use change, and forestry uncertainty in National GHG Inventories and prioritizing methodological improvements. This chapter was published in Climatic Change.
• Chapter 2. Conserving carbon: Evaluating term-limited conservation programs. I develop a structural model of the landowner decision to participate in a voluntary,
term-limited conservation program that constrains the optimal timing of land use change and that allows for re-enrollment, addressing a key literature gap in the evaluation of climate and conservation policy in forestry and agricultural sectors.
• Chapter 3. The problem with pricing “carbon”: exploring forest-driven albedo
effects in DICELAND. I update the Dynamic Integrated model for Climate and the Economy (DICE) to endogenously control global forest carbon sequestration activity. I use the so-called DICELAND model to estimate efficient global carbon prices and forest CO2 mitigation levels when accounting for albedo (land-darkening) effects of global forest expansion
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Environmental Inequalities and Social Protection: Essays in Environmental and Public Economics
Get PDFEnvironmental degradation, and climate change in particular, are increasingly recognized to be among humanity's largest threats. Calls to protect our ``Common Home'' are becoming more frequent and resolute. While firmly rooted in science, these declarations often build on the implicit assumption that we are all in the same boat. We are not. Environmental degradation has profoundly unequal impacts on individuals depending on where they were born, how much money they inherited, or the color of their skin. Some people will drown, and others are buying 400-feet yachts.The dangers posed by environmental degradation and the assurance of unequal impacts present colossal challenges for public policy. Even if mitigation actions can still reduce the worst impacts, scientists warn us that massive damages are already inevitable. Yet, because these damages will not be borne by everyone, enacting effective and fair public policies needs to account for variation in these impacts as well as in people's capacities to adapt to them. How should societies best protect their people against environmental risks?Figuring out the set of policies to best protect individuals presents a unique opportunity for research, and economics in particular. For all the powerful tools that economics offer, tackling this question requires two substantial departures from the current practice of neoclassical economics. First, recognizing that the concept of (potential) Pareto efficiency as a theoretical guide can only take us so far. Policies always create losers; given that the people who lose from a policy are seldom compensated for their troubles, it is not nearly enough to know that a policy could potentially improve the welfare of society if the right transfers were implemented. Pareto efficiency is not a morally neutral concept -- it always gives more weight to a subset of individuals, even if we often do not know who these individuals are. More complete analyses require accounting for the distribution of costs and benefits within the population in order for moral ideals to be an integral and explicit part of policy discussions.The second departure is the empirical counterpart of the first one. Most work in applied economics and policy analysis focuses on the estimation of average effects, where the average is either taken over a large group of individuals exposed to the policy, over a small group of individuals around some cutoffs (with regression discontinuities), or over a sample of "compliers" that we cannot identify (for instance with instrumental variables). Yet, the very moment we start thinking about who gains and who loses from a policy, average effects become quite inadequate. It is not enough to know that the average effect of a policy is positive. For instance, subsidies for individual solar panels could lead to more installations, but these installations might be concentrated at the very top of the income distribution, which could leave disadvantaged households to pay higher energy prices (due to the rising share of fixed costs in the distribution system, as this is the case in California). Taking compensation and distributional concerns seriously requires the use of less common empirical tools.I am fortunate to have started my PhD at a time when economics is undergoing a major shift in both directions. The explicit focus on distributional concerns is becoming more legitimate within the neoclassical framework, and this trend is reflected in environmental economics. While sociologists and epidemiologists have studied environmental justice for over 40 years, environmental economists are only starting to routinely take these distributional concerns into account. Similarly, an explosion of recent work in econometrics is pushing the frontiers regarding the estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects, the development of quantile estimators, and the identification of individual-treatment effects to better understand the distribution of policy impacts within a population. This dissertation builds on both trends to investigate environmental inequalities and social insurance in the United States.The first chapter investigates the public provision of climate risk information and its distributional impacts on the demand for residential flood insurance. Flooding is among the costliest disasters in the United States, but the demand for federally-subsidized insurance is extremely low. I find that inaccurate flood maps explain a substantial share of low insurance take-up. Using a novel approach based on unit-specific synthetic controls, I estimate that official map updates over the past two decades caused substantial declines in the demand for flood insurance, primarily in neighborhoods with a higher share of African Americans. I quantify the welfare costs of these inaccurate map updates, and estimate the distribution of gains that would accrue from the provision of better flood risk information. The second chapter highlights stark mobility inequalities between income groups during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when media coverage routinely used guilt to convince people to stay home. Guilt may work, but if sustained mobility reflects labor constraints rather than lifestyle preferences, money or a functioning safety net would probably have been better to keep people home. The third chapter emphasizes major shortcomings with the methodology used to estimate the impacts of public policies during the pandemic, and shows that standard robustness tests associated with fixed effects models should be viewed with considerable caution. Finally, the fourth chapter presents early findings regarding the impacts of housing choice vouchers on the residential outcomes and environmental exposure of tenants
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Using Ecological Models to Inform Decisions in Dynamic and Uncertain Environments
Get PDFI present results from three studies addressing apparently disparate challenges: conserving biodiversity, maintaining sustainable fisheries, and controlling infectious disease. All, however, require fateful choices to be made urgently in the context of substantial uncertainty and environmental change. Uncertainty and environmental change can have complex interactive effects on the decision-making process. Uncertainty adds an element of risk that can be amplified over time by changing conditions and dynamics feedback mechanisms. Furthermore, the combination of uncertainty and time introduces the possibility of learning; policymakers may choose to delay fateful choices until more information is available, invest in improved knowledge, and take experimental actions. For my dissertation, I developed mathematical models to understand how these interactive effects shape optimal decision-making in three applied case studies: prioritizing scarce COVID-19 vaccines, mitigating unintended genetic impacts of fish hatcheries, and designing fisheries monitoring programs. Across the case studies, I found that the time scales of underlying biological processes were critical for designing effective management strategies. Furthermore, when decision-makers respond adaptively to changes in the underlying ecosystem state, they can act as a stabilizing feedback mechanism, reducing the risks introduced by stochastic environmental variability and scientific uncertainty
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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