Can Panel Data Methodologies Determine the Impact of Climate Change on Economic Growth?

Richard Rosen

No inetwp171, Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking

Abstract: Several major papers have been published over the last ten years claiming to have detected the impact of either annual variations in weather or climate change on the GDPs of most countries in the world using panel data-based statistical methodologies. These papers rely on various multivariate regression equations which include the annual average temperatures for most countries in the world as one or more of the independent variables, where the usual dependent variable is the change in annual GDP for each country from one year to the next year over 30-50 year time periods. Unfortunately, the quantitative estimates derived in these papers are misleading because the equations from which they are calculated are wrong. The major reason the resulting regression equations are wrong is because they do not include any of the appropriate and usual economic factors or variables which are likely to be able to explain changes in GDP/economic growth whether or not climate change has already impacted each country`s economy. These equations, in short, exhibit suffer from "omitted variable bias", to use statistical terminology.

Keywords: climate change and economic growth; regression analysis; panel data methodologies; normal weather fluctuations vs. climate change; reforming peer review; omitted variable bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A14 C1 C30 C33 Q51 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2021-11-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/WP_171-Rosen.pdf (application/pdf)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4023735 First version, 2021 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:thk:wpaper:inetwp171

DOI: 10.36687/inetwp171

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pia Malaney ().