Publications by Economics and R - R posts
RTutor: The effect of air pollution on house prices
A key question of environmental economics is to economically quantify damages from different types of pollution and benefits from environmental policy that attempts to reduce pollution. Often only indirect measures are available. An important measure is house prices, which should to some extend reflect negative externalities from local pollution....
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RTutor: CO2 Trading and Risk of Firm Relocation
Many economists would agree that the most efficient way to fight global warming would be a world-wide tax or an emmission trading system for greenhouse gases. Yet, if only a part of the world implements such a scheme, a reasonable concern is that firms may decide to relocate to other parts of the world, causing job losses and less effective emmis...
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RTutor: Poverty Reduction and Deforestation
The environmental Kuznets curve hypothesizes an inverted u-shape relationship between income and environmental degradation: while richer countries tend to invest more ressources into environmental protection as their income rises, income growth in poor countries initially goes hand in hand with stronger degradation of natural ressources. But the ...
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RTutor: The effect of the TseTse fly on African Development
What is the causal impact of the TseTse fly on historical and current development in Africa? Marcella Alsan studies this question in her fascinating article ‘The effect of the TseTse fly on African development’ in the American Economic Review, 2015. As part of her Bachelor Thesis at Ulm University, Vanessa Schöller has generated a very nice ...
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RTutor: Emission Certificates and Green Innovation
Which policy instruments should we use to cost-effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions? For a given technological level there are many economic arguments in favour of tradeable emission certificates or a carbon tax: they generate static efficiency by inducing emission reductions in those sectors and for those technologies where it is most cos...
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RTutor: Pollution Reduction by Wind Energy
How much pollution reduction do we get from a MWh electricity produced by wind or solar power? In principle, this corresponds to the avoided pollution of a fossil fuel plant that reduces its output due to the higher production of renewable electricity. Which fossil fuel plant reduces its output and to which degree is not straightforward, however....
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Economic time series data quiz as a shiny app for mobile phones
Nowadays, a lot of interesting time series data is freely available that allows us to compare important economic, social and environmental trends across countries. I feel that one can learn a lot by surfing through the data sections on the websites of institutions like the Gapminder Foundation, the World Bank, or the OECD. At the same time, I am ...
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RTutor: Wall Street and the Housing Bubble
It is widely recognized that aggressive securitization of housing loans played a decisive role in the creating of a house price bubble in the US and the subsequent financial crisis. An open question is in how far financial experts on securitization were aware of that fragile house price bubble they helped creating. Ing-Haw Cheng, Sahil Raina, and...
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RTutor: Water Pollution and Cancer
One very important benefit of stronger environmental protection is to reduce the damaging effects of pollution on human health. In his very interesting article “The Consequences of Industrialization: Evidence from Water Pollution and Digestive Cancers in China” (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2012) Avraham Ebenstein studies the impact of...
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Some Tools for Writing Shiny Apps
Recently, I have written and hosted several multi-user Shiny apps. One example, is Taddle that runs on my server at http://taddle.mathematik.uni-ulm.de. Taddle is a multi-user shiny app that offers a free and simple way to allocate seminar topics. (Next time you need to assign seminar topics, why not have a look at Taddle?) I just wanted to brief...
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