Environmental Economics Undergraduate Thesis Ideas

[njskatchmo]

So I am in the midst of an undergraduate research thesis. I fear that my data simply will not support my thesis. I am not ready to ditch the topic I have yet, but I want to be able to keep moving forward if that decision becomes necessary. In brief my topic deals with the EKC. Some argue that you must control for inequality when doing an EKC regression. I argue that you cannot do this without including a control for poverty. Since increasing inequality increases poverty all else held constant and poverty is said to be related to the environment. However, my hypothesized mechanism in part requires that I stick to deforestation data. In addition, measures of poverty are few and far between so I am using caloric intake to proxy its effects.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can easily transfer this to a similar topic in the EKC field?

Does anyone have any suggestions in the field of environmental econ in general for areas to explore that would be an easy transition from this topic?

Any comments are welcome.

Any papers to suggest?

[njskatchmo]

no replies guys?

[tm_guru]

Originally Posted by njskatchmo

So I am in the midst of an undergraduate research thesis. I fear that my data simply will not support my thesis. I am not ready to ditch the topic I have yet, but I want to be able to keep moving forward if that decision becomes necessary. In brief my topic deals with the EKC. Some argue that you must control for inequality when doing an EKC regression. I argue that you cannot do this without including a control for poverty. Since increasing inequality increases poverty all else held constant and poverty is said to be related to the environment. However, my hypothesized mechanism in part requires that I stick to deforestation data. In addition, measures of poverty are few and far between so I am using caloric intake to proxy its effects.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can easily transfer this to a similar topic in the EKC field?

Does anyone have any suggestions in the field of environmental econ in general for areas to explore that would be an easy transition from this topic?

Any comments are welcome.

Any papers to suggest?

I don't have any suggestions for your research, but a couple of observations...

1) If your data doesn't support your hypothesis, then it doesn't support your hypothesis and you deal with that. You write the research, identify what the data does say and as part of your conclusions suggest alternative methodologies and datasets which could be used to possibly deal with the issue you looked at and review and possibly alter your findinds.

2) While I'm sure the environment suffers in area where there are a higher proportion of poor people, my fiancee (a Master's Educated Nutritionist and Dietician) assures me three types of people have high caloric intake;

a. Poor People
b. Overweight people
c. People who are poor & overweight

How do you propose to isolate the effects of this weak proxy variable?

[AREStudentHopeful]

I think your analysis of caloric intake applies more for the poor people in more developed countries tm_guru (much different than the poor people in Haiti or Somalia). Although, I would still use a better proxy (maybe median income normalized by purchasing power of parity?) for poverty.

I also question the deforestation variable. If you wanted to tie it directly to deforestation, then I would say it's okay. But since you seem to be doing an over EKC comparison, you have to take into account all environmental quality which doesn't always hold with deforestation. There are some environmental indexes you could use (though this would limit the countries you could study). Just continue your lit review on this; there are quite a few papers that cover this and some with some very interesting methods and proxy variables.

[tm_guru]

Originally Posted by AREStudentHopeful

I think your analysis of caloric intake applies more for the poor people in more developed countries tm_guru (much different than the poor people in Haiti or Somalia). Although, I would still use a better proxy (maybe median income normalized by purchasing power of parity?) for poverty.

I also question the deforestation variable. If you wanted to tie it directly to deforestation, then I would say it's okay. But since you seem to be doing an over EKC comparison, you have to take into account all environmental quality which doesn't always hold with deforestation. There are some environmental indexes you could use (though this would limit the countries you could study). Just continue your lit review on this; there are quite a few papers that cover this and some with some very interesting methods and proxy variables.

Yea, I presumed it was a developed country.