Annotated Index to my Publications and Papers
Professor of Economics
University of Guelph
Guelph Ontario Canada
N1G 2W1
rmckitri [at] uoguelph.ca
My writings are grouped under the topic headings on the left. New items live here on the home page until I get around to filing them. Peer-reviewed articles are denoted **. Invited and edited articles or chapters are denoted *.
NEW ITEMS (as of April 20 2012)
GREEN ENERGY ACT: I was on TVO's The Agenda on April 19th, debating the province's Green Energy Act. On the whole I was pleased at the outcome.
THE DISMAL THEOREM: I have released a Discussion Paper entitled "Cheering Up the Dismal Theorem" which critiques the basis of the Weitzman (2009) argument that people should, in principle, be willing to spend an arbitrarily large amount of current income to prevent a catastrophic loss of consumption due to the risk of a large future climate change event. It turns out there are lots of Discussion Papers floating around criticizing various aspects of the Dismal Theorem, so many so that journals are already considering the topic somewhat done to death even though the critiques are mostly not yet published. Mine differs from the others in that I don't try to argue that the basic structure of the argument needs to be tweaked. Instead I am arguing that Weitzman's main result depends on an approximation term that can be replaced with its exact counterpart, and if this is done the results no longer go through.
HOUSEHOLD SIZE AND THE ERADICATION OF MALARIA:In 2011 I had the opportunity to join a research project on malaria incidence and eradication around the world. We have released our report as a UofG Economics Discussion Paper and a shorter version is being submitted to a journal. I've found this a fascinating project to work on, and I believe our results may actually help accelerate the elimination of this disease.
ENCOMPASSING TESTS OF SOCIOECONOMIC SIGNALS IN CLIMATE DATA: I have a new Discussion Paper on the subject of surface temperature data quality. It occurs to me that the current debate is interminable because people are arguing from different premises and incommensurable data sets. To bring these disputes closer to actual resolution requires building some larger data sets that encompass apparently conflicting results, such that one can be shown to arise only as a restricted case of a model whose general form supports the other, where the restrictions can be tested. I present two examples, one testing Parker's idea that the failure to observe a difference in trends between windy and calm conditions proves there's no socioeconomic contamination of large-scale trends, and another testing a BEST-style sample split as a means of measuring land surface disruption effects on temperature trends. Data/Code archive is here.
TROPOSPHERIC TRENDS: MODELS vs OBSERVATIONS ROUND II: In fall 2010 I published a paper with Steve McIntyre and Chad Herman comparing climate model-generated predictions to observations from satellites and weather balloons in the lower- and mid-troposphere over the tropics, a key region for assessing climate model validity. That paper applied two methods, the panel model, which is a fairly well-known econometric method, as well as the Vogelsang-Franses multivariate trend estimation method, a less-well known but superior alternative which adapts the general HAC method to the estimation of robust confidence intervals for linear trends. The data set used in MMH spanned 1979 to 2009. I extended the data set to include weather balloon data back to 1958 for the purpose of comparing observed lower- and mid-troposphere trends in the tropics to climate model predictions. A challenge in this case is that the 1977-78 Pacific Climate Shift introduces a step-like change in the mean of the data which causes a spurious increase in the estimated trend. But controlling for the step-change affects the VF critical values. Tim Vogelsang has extended the theory behind the VF method to yield robust trend variances in the presence of autocorrelation of unknown form when a step-change occurs at a known point in the sample. In our new paper, just released as a Discussion Paper and en route to a journal, Tim and I present a detailed explanation of the HAC approach to trend comparisons, including the relevant asymptotics and a bootstrap method for generating empirical critical values, then we apply the method to the Hadley and RICH balloon data for the tropical troposphere. Controlling for the 1977 Pacific Climate Shift we find the trends are insignificant from 1958-2010 and the discrepancy with climate models is highly significant.
