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BRITISH SCIENCE WEEK 2015 BLOG

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Contributed to by staff & students of The Bartlett School of Environment, Energy & Resources

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Why mean sometimes means meaningless – stochastic IAMs can help to assess Climate Change impacts

By ucqbohb, on 18 March 2015

r.eagle@ucl.ac.uk-comms-staff-1Many applied economists are concerned with average effects of  a policy intervention or changed economic conditions on economic subjects. Often linear regression is their tool of choice for conducting impact analysis. However, focusing on the mean might mask some interesting effects along the distribution of the outcome variable.

Suppose you were interested in evaluating a labour market reform that possibly has an impact on the wage distribution. Then, calculating the average effects on wages could be useless – imagine the politically sensitive case when mean wages remain constant but increase in the upper quantile while decrease in the lower quantile. That is, focusing on the mean masks the fact that the reform resulted in higher inequality. In the case of applied economics, the use of quantile regression has therefore become quite popular to get insights into the effects that occur below or above the mean.

For the same reason we have to consider the effects along the whole wage distribution in applied labour economics, we have to look in the tails when considering the economic impacts of climate change: We just might miss the relevant stuff! (more…)

What does Climate Change do for the public image of Science?

By ucqbroe, on 17 March 2015

Concern about differences in priority over Climate Change between specialists and the public

changing-environment-(c)-istockphotoAs a young researcher I see a vast disparity in the way in which Climate Change is seen by the general public and in academia. In academia, we are intensely occupied with the solutions for achieving sustainability, supplementing our own work by attending conferences and reading journals. The general public will see Climate Change articles in the media and some may find themselves watching a documentary on the subject every now and then. But this gulf goes with any topic where ‘specialists’ are involved; take medicine for example. The question is – does this matter? (more…)