David I. Stern

This page lists my current research interests. I am most interested in working with PhD students or potential collaborators on projects that relate to or build on these areas. I have research ongoing in each of these areas but don't describe current projects in detail usually until we are ready to post a working paper on the web and I won't write about areas that I am just beginning to think about. So, while this is more forward looking than a publications list, it's not that forward looking. You can find out much more about my already completed research on my blog.

Prospective PhD students: I am interested in supervising students who have strong economics and mathematics skills and are interested in collaborating on projects in these and related areas. Please check the Crawford School's pages on the Economics PhD program and the application process.

Energy Economics:

Energy and Economic Growth: I worked with Jack Pezzey, Astrid Kander, Kerstin Enflo, Yingying Lu, Mar Rubio, Zsuzsanna Csereklyei, and Akshay Shanker on understanding the role of energy in economic growth in the long run - over one to several centuries. We have published five papers on this topic: Stern and Kander (2012), Stern and Enflo (2013), and Kander and Stern (2014), Csereklyei et al. (2016), and Stern et al. (2021). We find that the greater energy availability that resulted from switching to coal enabled an acceleration in the rate of economic growth. However, energy contributes less to growth when it is more abundant, and the right incentives were needed to encourage innovation to exploit coal. We also have one, so far unpublished, working paper that explains the decline in energy intensity over time. This research was largely funded by an ARC Discovery grant (DP12), and we also won a grant from the Handelsbanken foundation in Sweden for research on this topic.

Electricity and Infrastructure:

• I was one of six theme leaders for a research consortium led by Catherine Wolfram at UC Berkeley and Oxford Policy Management on the topic of electricity and economic growth in low income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia funded by the UK Department for International Development. I wrote a survey paper on the macroeconomics of electricity and growth with Paul Burke and Stephan Bruns. We find that there are few robust studies. The best studies find moderate impacts for electricity infrastucture on growth -- the output elasticity is around 0.03. I am now working with a masters student in India, Suryadeepto Nag, on the effects of access to, and reliability of, electricity on development in India.

• I have also done some follow up research on the effects of infrastructure on economic growth in collaboration with Govinda Timilsina at the World Bank and my PhD student Debasish Das. Debasish is also working on prepaid electricity metering and we coauthored a policy brief on this topic.

• I am also working with Akshay Shanker and Chandra Krishnamurthy on modeling electricity markets with large amounts of renewables and storage. Chandra presented our paper at the Future of Electricity Markets Summit in Sydney in 2019. Together with Gordon Leslie and Mike Hogan, Akshay and I wrote a review paper based on the session at the summit that has been published in the Electricity Journal. After much delay, we are now finalizing our substantive paper on this topic and should be able to post a working paper soon.

Energy Efficiency: I was the chief investigator on an ARC Discovery grant (DP16) on "Energy Efficiency Innovation, Diffusion and the Rebound Effect." Stephan Bruns and Alessio Moneta were partner investigators. Zsuzsanna Csereklyei was a postdoctoral research fellow working on the grant in 2016-2017. Zsuzsanna worked on the technology diffusion aspects, while Stephan and Alessio collaborated with me on estimating the economy-wide rebound effect. We published six papers as a result of this grant:

1. Zsuzsanna Csereklyei and I looked at the effects of restructuring of the US electricity sector on investment in generation capacity, in particular higher efficiency technologies.

2. I investigated how well projections of energy intensity have matched reality. Based on my analysis, I think recent projections are over-optimistic about future reductions in energy intensity. This may be because models underestimate the strength of the economy-wide rebound effect.

3. With Zsuzsanna, I looked at aircraft fuel economy. We used data at the individual plane level, aggregating it up to airline fleets. Controlling for the effect of aircraft size and age, we find that the technically achievable fleet fuel economy improves with the size of airlines and the price of fuel and worsens with higher capital costs.

4. Stephan Bruns, Alessio Moneta and I estimated the economy-wide rebound effect for the United States using a structural vector autoregression model. We find that rebound is near 100% in the long run.

5. In collaboration with Mahboubeh Jafari, we found similar results for Iran.

6. The final paper, published in Energy Policy, reviews the literature on the economy-wide rebound effect. Evidence is mixed, though it does look like the rebound is large, perhaps as large as 100% in the long run.

I also contributed to a review paper on energy efficiency with eighteen coauthors led by Harry Saunders.

Substitutability: I am interested in getting better estimates of elasticities both by using new econometric techniques and meta-analysis. Analysis of the performance of different ways of estimating elasticities is also of interest. I am also interested in the role of substitutability in economic growth.

Research Assessment: I am interested in meta-analysis and citation analysis, both of which can be seen as forms of research assessment:

Meta-Analysis: In 2014, we published a paper on the meta-analysis of the energy-GDP causality relationship. I wrote a follow up paper with Stephan Bruns, published in Empirical Economics on the econometric theory of the meta-analysis of studies using vector autoregression models. Together with Johannes Koenig, we also carried out a replication and robustness check of my 1993 paper in Energy Economics for the special issue of Energy Economics on replication. We carry out a meta-analysis of the robustness checks. The general findings hold up for new data and different specifications in terms of what results in higher statistical significance, though the specific findings about statistical significance do not. More recently, I was a coauthor on a meta-analysis of the literature on the valuation of biodiversity loss. People seem to value human impacts greater than natural ones. Now I am a contributor to another project that Stephan Bruns is leading on reporting biases and statistical power in environmental science.

Bibliometrics: I have applied citation analysis methods in several areas:

• My paper in the Journal of Economic Literature presents confidence intervals for economics journals for impact factors and ranks. I have now written a follow up paper with Richard Tol and Johannes Koenig, which estimates confidence intervals for recursive journal impact factors. A comment in Scientometrics shows that the estimated confidence intervals of impact factors are very different to those that would be estimated assuming citations have a Poisson distribution.

• My paper on whether citation analysis can be used in research assessment exercises in the social sciences was published in PLoS ONE. I wrote a follow up paper with Stephan Bruns on research assessment using early citation information that uses a more realistic research assessment set up.

• Two recent published papers look at using citations to rank authors and institutions. With Richard Tol, I wrote a response to a recent paper in the American Economic Review. That paper had argued on theoretical and empirical grounds for the superiority of the Euclidean citation index. We argue that breadth of impact is also a valid assessment criterion and show that the empirical evidence for the Euclidean index is not so strong when we take cohort effects into account. I also coauthored a paper with my Crawford School colleague Bjoern Dressel on ranking public policy schools in the Asia-Pacific region.

• I also coauthored with Bob Costanza, Ida Kubiszewski, and Luke Concollato a review of the journal Ecosystem Services for its ten-year anniversary.

Climate Change: My ongoing climate change research focuses on the following two areas:

Trends and Drivers of Climate Change:

• I was a coauthor of a chapter on this topic in the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report. Resulting from that collaboration together with Reyer Gerlagh and Paul Burke, I developed a new alternative to the environmental Kuznets curve using long-run growth rates. Using this method, I also wrote a paper with Luis Sanchez on total greenhouse gas emissions. Together with Jeremy van Dijk and Donglan Zha, I applied these methods to global and Chinese pollution concentrations. This research is summarized in a survey paper on the environmental Kuznets curve.

• With Xueting Jiang, I have written a paper on the short-run relationship between growth and emissions to investigate whether the emissions-income elasticity varies depending on whether the economy is growing or declining. We find that negative oil market shocks caused the elasticity to be greater in some recessions, but intrinsically the effect of the business cycle on emissions is fairly symmetric.

Econometric Modelling of Climate Change: With Stephan Bruns and Zsuzsanna Csereklyei, I published a paper in the Journal of Econometrics, which focuses on the role of the ocean in climate change. Using an I(2) multicointegration model, we found that the climate sensitivity is 2.8C, which is close to the consensus in the climate science literature and higher than estimates from I(1) cointegrated VARs. I have now started working with Alessio Moneta on analysing some prehistoric climate data.

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Last updated on 9 May 2023 by David Stern