Thanks, this is interesting! I quickly read through the core paper and am a bit confused.
It seems like you’re understanding income adjustment to be one of the main additions in the paper. Where are you seeing that? The title/abstract/etc. seem to be pitching greater spatial resolution as the main contribution. Greater spatial resolution helps with income adjustment but isn’t sufficient. As far as I can tell the paper primarily uses regular old GDP per capita (with the de rigeur acknowledgement that GDP isn’t a great welfare measure). The only income adjustment I see is a couple of mentions of rich/poor specifications and the supplementary information suggests that this is just splitting the formula for the growth of damages based on whether a country falls into the rich bin or poor bin.
They explain the increased cost not as due to income adjustment (as I understand things) but because:
The median estimates of the GSCC (Fig. 1) are significantly higher than the Inter-agency Working Group estimates, primarily due to the higher damages associated with the empirical macroeconomic production function
All that said, I wish it did use logarithmic utility because that seems like an important improvement!
(FYI: All the inline footnotes still link to a Google doc.)
Thanks, this is interesting! I quickly read through the core paper and am a bit confused.
It seems like you’re understanding income adjustment to be one of the main additions in the paper. Where are you seeing that? The title/abstract/etc. seem to be pitching greater spatial resolution as the main contribution. Greater spatial resolution helps with income adjustment but isn’t sufficient. As far as I can tell the paper primarily uses regular old GDP per capita (with the de rigeur acknowledgement that GDP isn’t a great welfare measure). The only income adjustment I see is a couple of mentions of rich/poor specifications and the supplementary information suggests that this is just splitting the formula for the growth of damages based on whether a country falls into the rich bin or poor bin.
They explain the increased cost not as due to income adjustment (as I understand things) but because:
All that said, I wish it did use logarithmic utility because that seems like an important improvement!
(FYI: All the inline footnotes still link to a Google doc.)