The paper focuses on establishing causation in regression analysis in observational settings. Simple static regression analysis cannot establish causality in the absence of a priori theory on possible causal mechanisms or controlled and randomized experiments. However, two regression based...

We carry out a meta-analysis of the very large literature on Granger causality tests between energy use and economic output to determine if there is a genuine effect in this literature or whether the large number of apparently significant results is due to publication and misspecification bias....

Academic economists appear to be intensely interested in rankings of journals, institutions, and individuals. Yet there is little discussion of the uncertainty associated with these rankings. To illustrate the uncertainty associated with citations-based rankings, I compute the standard error of...

Ecological economics is a relatively new interdisciplinary field concerned with the relationship between economic systems and the biological and physical world. This article covers the following topics: A discussion of views on whether ecological economics is just a field or approach within...

Do citations accumulate too slowly in the social sciences to be used to assess the quality of recent articles? I investigate whether this is the case using citation data for all articles in economics and political science published in 2006 and indexed in the Web of Science. Surprisingly,...

This paper analyses productivity, profitability and efficiency by climate zone for the WA grains industry over the past 30 years. More specifically, following the studies by the Department of Agriculture and Food of Western Australia (2011) and Che, et.al (2012), this paper uses the Törnqvist...

The scale of the ambition to decouple emissions growth from energy consumption in the economy runs counter to several decades of debates and literatures on the limits of government. Transport biofuels are an early and influential case of the policy capacity challenge in the transition to...

This paper considers the idea of informality in market exchange, as introduced into the economic development literature by Keith Hart in the 1970s. In addition to Hart (1971, 1973) it will discuss three writers who may be considered his intellectual forerunners. Each, to a greater or less...

This paper studies the variation in village head selection rules across Indonesia using panel data over 1997–2007. The selection of village heads is often thought of as being determined by national level legislation, with elections in villages located in kabupaten and directly appointed...

The expression subsistence affluence is a catchphrase for certain perceptions of reality in Papua New Guinea, and after 50 years it still actively conditions opinions of the country (even though its population has trebled in the meantime). The paper examines antecedents of the concept in the...