Saturday, November 21, 2009

And then a Reject...

Right after getting a revise and resubmit I get a "reject" for my paper "Between Estimates of the Environmental Kuznets Curve". Understandably, referees and editors are unwilling to publish more papers on the EKC and this paper apparently confused people as to whether it was a comment on Vollebergh et al. or a new econometric method for estimating EKCs (it's both) and if it was the latter I didn't apparently do a very good job of explaining why that is justified and worthwhile. I'm going to turn round pretty fast to submit this somewhere else... I also have two revise and resubmits to do...

6 comments:

  1. Sorry about the reject, though two r&rs in a week must be some consolation. I am as tired as anyone who's ever published one of the parade of EKC papers across my desk, but thought the WP was interesting. It's startling that you can do better, statistically speaking, by throwing out every scrap of the within country variation (Bob Deacon and I tried just looking at within country changes, and didn't come up with much - though I relied on the WP version of Perman and Stern quite a lot if I recall correctly, so thanks for that - but the data series was pretty short to get major country-level changes, let alone how limited and odd it is to look at 1-2 monitoring sites per country). Ah well - on to the next!

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  2. Peltzman just used the phrase 'mortality Kuznets curve' at the SEA meetings. Aiyeeeee!

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  3. Is that the relationship where total mortality/population is higher in HDCs than in MDCs because the latter have more old people as a share of the population?!

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  4. Yeah. I think hte main point was that while income inequality on an annual basis is up, rising lifespans in poor countries means that total life income is becoming less unequal. Yay? Anyhow, I was just alarmed that folks might leave the room and start estimating quadaratics again...

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  5. Okayyyy... so more a "mortality adjusted KC" I thought globally income inequality would be declining anyway with the rapid growth in China and India. Or is increasing inequality within those two countries offsetting the between country decline in inequality?

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  6. He didn't give us hard numbers on those - only data he showed were historic for OECD plus a few others. No paper yet, either.

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