EAPSI: New Approaches to Ground-Truthing Economic Models for Energy Policy Analysis

对于复杂的政策问题，验证经济模型的准确性尤其困难，比如能源监管如何影响受监管公司的劳动力。对劳动力的经济影响是各国政策制定者在寻求实施清洁能源政策的同时保持就业机会的一个关切。该项目旨在探索一种经常用于政策的经济模型的表现，以确定中国拟议的能源消费监管对环境和经济的影响，在中国，清洁能源和经济增长是政策的重中之重。这项研究将使用新的社会科学方法来验证模型结果，以纳入当地的知识和专业知识。该项目将在清华大学与中国著名气候能源政策专家滕飞教授合作进行。该项目的发现将有助于经济学家和政策制定者寻求准确的模型和精心设计的能源政策。中国对清洁和高效能源的优先考虑包括最近建立能源消费交易体系的努力。可计算一般均衡(CGE)模型经常被用来模拟整个经济的政策影响，包括排放和劳动力影响。然而，CGE模型预测的外部验证还没有得到充分的研究。为了估计中国-S能源消费交易方案的分配劳动力效应，本研究将使用中国版本的全球能源与资源贸易综合模型(TIGER)，这是一个现有的全球动态CGE模型，以生成一组初始结果，并根据该结果对模型进行验证。这些结果将为一种新的专家启发过程提供信息，以生成用于敏感度分析的主观概率分布。他们还将介绍预计发生分配影响的机制，以及这些机制是否符合模型？S结构，加强正在进行的改进能源政策和模型的努力。该奖项由东亚和太平洋暑期学院项目资助一名美国研究生的夏季研究，由美国国家科学基金会和中国科技部联合资助。

Validating the accuracy of economic models is particularly difficult for complex policy questions, such as the question of how energy regulations affect the labor force of regulated firms. Economic impacts on the workforce are a concern for policymakers everywhere seeking to implement clean energy policies while preserving jobs. This project seeks to explore the performance of a type of economic model frequently used for policy to identify the environmental and economic impacts of a proposed energy consumption regulation in China, where clean energy and economic growth are top policy priorities. This research will validate the model results using novel social science methods to incorporate local knowledge and expertise. This project will be conducted at Tsinghua University in collaboration with Professor Teng Fei, a noted expert on climate-energy policy in China. The findings from this project will be useful for economists and policymakers seeking accurate models and well-designed energy policy. China's prioritization of clean and efficient energy includes a recent effort to establish an energy consumption trading system. Computable general equilibrium (CGE) models are frequently used to simulate economy-wide policy effects, including emissions and labor impacts. However, external validation of CGE model predictions is understudied. To estimate the distributional labor effects from China?s energy consumption trading scheme, this research will use a China-level version of the Trade Integrated Global Energy and Resources (TIGER) model, an existing global dynamic CGE model, to generate an initial set of results against which the model can be validated. These results will inform a novel expert elicitation process to generate subjective probability distributions for sensitivity analysis. They will also inform discussion of the mechanisms through which distributional impacts are predicted to occur and if these comport with the model?s structure, enhancing ongoing efforts to improve energy policy and modeling.This award, under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program, supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.