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Today’s guest is Bob Murphy of Texas Tech University. We discuss his work on climate change and the social cost of carbon.

Bob started working on issues related to climate change when he began working with the Institute for Energy Research. We discuss the implications of the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) used to evaluate the impact of climate change, the pivotal role played by discount rates in evaluating any kind of climate policy, the pitfalls of carbon taxation, and the opportunities presented by geo-engineering technologies. (more…)

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The post Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, and Geo-Engineering with Bob Murphy appeared first on The Economics Detective.

Today’s guest is Bob Murphy of Texas Tech University. We discuss his work on climate change and the social cost of carbon.

Bob started working on issues related to climate change when he began working with the Institute for Energy Research. We discuss the implications of the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) used to evaluate the impact of climate change, the pivotal role played by discount rates in evaluating any kind of climate policy, the pitfalls of carbon taxation, and the opportunities presented by geo-engineering technologies. (more…)

Subscribe to Economics Detective Radio on iTunes, Android, or Stitcher.

The post Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, and Geo-Engineering with Bob Murphy appeared first on The Economics Detective.

Today I discuss one of my own papers: “Instructions” by Freeman, Kimbrough, Petersen, and Tong. This research project on experimental instructions has been ongoing for years, but it was recently conditionally accepted for publication. I tell the story of how the research came together and detail some of the results.

A survey of instruction delivery and reinforcement methods in recent laboratory experiments reveals a wide and inconsistently-reported variety of practices and limited research evaluating their effectiveness. Thus we experimentally compare how methods of delivering and reinforcing experiment instructions impact subjects’ understanding and retention. We report a one-shot individual decision task in which mistakes can be unambiguously identified in behavior and find that mistakes are prevalent in our base-line treatment which uses plain, but relatively standard experimental instructions. We find combinations of reinforcement methods that can eliminate half of subjects’ mistakes, and we find that we can induce a similar reduction in mistakes via enhancements to the content of instructions. Residual mistakes suggests this may be an important source of noise in experimental studies.

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The post Experimental Economics and the Importance of Instructions appeared first on The Economics Detective.