Stanford University

Environment

FSI scholars approach their research on the environment from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Center on Food Security and the Environment weighs the connection between climate change and agriculture; the impact of biofuel expansion on land and food supply; how to increase crop yields without expanding agricultural lands; and the trends in aquaculture. FSE’s research spans the globe – from the potential of smallholder irrigation to reduce hunger and improve development in sub-Saharan Africa to the devastation of drought on Iowa farms. David Lobell, a senior fellow at FSI and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has looked at the impacts of increasing wheat and corn crops in Africa, South Asia, Mexico and the United States; and has studied the effects of extreme heat on the world’s staple crops.

Stanford Law & Policy Review Food Policy Symposium

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One-day symposium with two panels discussions on Environmental and Market Regulation issues as they relate to Food Policy. FSE PhD student Joanne Gaskell will sit on the Environmental Impact of Production and Policy panel. California State Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez will be the keynote speaker.

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Stanford Law School

Joanne Gaskell

Energy and Environment Building - 4205
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Stanford University
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Joanne Gaskell comes from Vancouver, where she first developed her taste for the outdoors. She graduated with honors from Swarthmore College, with a Bachelor's Degree in Biology and Economics.

Prior to joining IPER she worked for two years at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, D.C. as a Research Assistant in the Environment and Production Technology Division. Joanne's research addressed the impact of food production on the environment, and the contribution of environmental factors to food security. While at IFPRI, Joanne served as an author on the Food and Cultivated Systems chapters of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. She also co-authored a United Nations Hunger Task Force-commissioned paper on environmental and social correlates of child hunger in Africa.

Joanne's current research interests include biofuels, the value of genetic diversity to crop production systems and the water and nutrient implications of intensive livestock production. She is a member of Sigma Xi and a recipient of the Science Council of British Columbia's "Headed for Success" award.

Joanne Gaskell Speaker
Symposiums

Research Presentations by Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellows (session 3)

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In this session of the Shorenstein APARC Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellows Research Presentations, the following will be presented:

Buddhaditta Bose, "Spanning the Chain and Capturing Value in the Clinical Research Outsourcing (CRO) Industry"

The clinical research outsourcing (CRO) industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that has grown over time and is dominated by a few global top CROs. There is no significant Indian player in the market because the global top CROs have strategically chosen to be at the higher end of the value chain. It is therefore imperative that an Indian CRO, like Reliance Life Sciences (RLS), focus its strategy on spanning the chain and providing higher value add to capture the attention of the clients and successfully compete in the marketplace thereby becoming a leading player in the market.

Bose's research looks at the industry value chain and the relative positioning of the case in point - RLS with respect to the value chain and provides recommendations on how RLS can climb up the value chain. His research also highlights the macro view of the industry in context of the basic theme of the research mentioned above.

Girish Masand, "Advanced Tools for Complete Characterization of Biopharmaceutical Products"

Characterization of biopharmaceuticals plays a key role in the identification, structural elucidation and quantitation of chemical constituents or chemical impurities in current protein based therapeutics. For a biopharmaceutical protein to be well characterized, it is essential to be able to define the natural molecular heterogeneity, impurity profile, and potency of that product with a high degree of confidence. Given the continuing development of new technologies in this field, and the complex nature of biopharmaceutical drugs, the recent guidance documents have been drafted to include more stringent and detailed analytical data requirements for product registration. In order to move faster through the regulatory framework and obtain product approval, it is important for any biopharmaceutical company to keep abreast of the current and emerging trend in analytical technologies.

Masand's research provides an assessment of current practices at Reliance Life Sciences and newer trends in analytical characterization of biopharmaceuticals, which will help Reliance Life Sciences to broaden its current perspective of product characterization, sequentially helping to launch its pipeline products at a faster pace.

Masatsugu Mitsuyama, "Strategy of Cable TV Companies - To Get Through the Competitive Environment, What Will Cable TV Companies Do?

In 1948, cable television (CATV) originated in the United States with the purpose of enhancing poor reception of local over-the-air television signals. Since its origin, the CATV industry has grown steadily, expanding its service line-ups and advancing its service features. However, in last two decades, the environment surrounding the CATV industry changed. Competitors such as DirecTV, Dish Network, Verizon and AT&T entered into multi-channel video service. With advanced service features and attractive pricing, these competitors promote existing CATV customers to switch providers and the CATV industry continued to decrease the number of video customers in the last 8 years. Mitsuyama analyzes the CATV industry's approach to get through this competitive environment. Service advancement seems to be a key factor for CATV companies to differentiate themselves. He makes argument especially on "advanced interactive services", on which the CATV industry is focusing its efforts.

Masahito Sugita, "Creation of New Business in Japan and U.S. - Consideration in the Trend Toward a Cloud Computing World"

"Cloud Computing" is a new concept in the structure of computing systems, and is spreading gradually into our lives and businesses. The big shift from the present computing style to the cloud computing style, especially in the fields of enterprise IT systems, is predicted to occur within the next 3 to 5 years. This will fundamentally change information and communication technology (ICT) business models around the world.

Sugita analyzes the impacts of cloud computing on the ICT businesses and the structure of industry, and investigates new strategies suitable for the changing business environments from the point of view of creating new business in Japan and the U.S.

 

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Buddhaditta Bose Reliance Industries Speaker
Girish Masand Reliance Industries Speaker
Masatsugu Mitsuyama Sumitomo Corporation Speaker
Masahito Sugita Mitsubishi Electric Speaker
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Satellite Evidence for Yield Growth Opportunities in Northwest India

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Improving crop yields in major agricultural regions is one of the foremost scientific challenges for the next few decades. In Northwest India, the stagnation of wheat yields over the past decade presents a distressing contrast to the tremendous yield gains achieved during the Green Revolution. One commonly proposed way to raise yields is to reduce the often considerable gap between yield potential and average yields realized in farmers' fields, yet the likely effectiveness of different strategies to close this gap has been poorly known. Here we use a unique, decade long satellite-based dataset on wheat yields to examine various options for closing the yield gap in the south of Punjab. Persistent spatial differences in sowing dates and distance from canal are found to be significant sources of yield variation, with the latter factor suggesting the importance of reliable access to irrigation water for yield improvement in this region. However, the total yield gains achievable by addressing persistent factors are only a small fraction of yield losses in farmers' fields. The majority of the yield gap is found to arise from factors unrelated to field location, such as interactions between management and weather. Technologies that improve farmers' ability to anticipate or adjust to weather variations, or that improve stability of genotype performance across different weather conditions, therefore appear crucial if average crop yields are to approach their genetic potential.

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Field Crops Research
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David Lobell
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Adapting to Shifting Government Priorities: An Assessment of the Performance and Strategy of India's ONGC

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The state-owned company Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC) is India's largest company devoted to exploration and production (E&P). This paper attempts to unpack the dynamic of the government-ONGC relationship. Focusing specifically on how government ownership and control has influenced ONGC's performance and strategy, this paper makes four main arguments.

First, ONGC exists, just as with national oil companies in many other countries, because of a legacy of suspicion about outsiders.  It performed well when it was tasked with things that were not that difficult and when it had help for the more difficult ventures, such as frontier E&P and development.

Second, ONGC has run into trouble as it matured, and the roots of its troubles are mainly in its interactions with the GoI and secondarily in its management.

Third, a slew of reforms instituted since the mid 1990s have fundamentally changed the landscape of the E&P sector in India and the dynamic of government-ONGC relationship. Targeted at improving corporate governance, enhancing competition in E&P, and eliminating price controls, those reforms have had a mixed impact on ONGC's performance and strategy. They also highlight the difficulties the government has had in encouraging higher efficiencies in ONGC and the oil and gas sector.

Fourth, given the deep interconnects of the oil and gas sector with India's political economy, fixing the oil and gas sector essentially entails fixing the larger political economy within which the sector is embedded.

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Program on Energy and Sustainable Development Working Paper #91
Authors
Varun Rai

Climate Policy Instruments in the Real World

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On Tuesday, September 7, 2010, the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development in collaboration with the Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and Stanford Law School hosted a special conference on Climate Policy Instruments in the Real World.

This conference featured presentations by leading researchers on the political, economic, and regulatory challenges associated with major climate policy instruments.  The goal of this conference was to transfer the state-of-the-art in policy-relevant academic research on key aspects of climate policy design and analysis to the business, regulatory and policymaking communities.  Each presentation was followed by comments from two discussants that develop the practical implications of the research results presented for decision-makers in industry and government.

Topics our experts explored included: setting a price for carbon, engaging the developing world in climate change mitigation, the role of renewable energy sources in climate change mitigation, mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gases from the transportation sector, managing intermittency in the electricity sector, and mechanisms for adapting to climate change.  

We would like to thank everybody for their participation on September 7, 2010.

For more conference information, please visit:

http://www.certain.com/system/profile/web/index.cfm?PKwebID=0x1992925e31&varPage=home

 


Thank you to all our sponsors:

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Bechtel Conference Center

Robert Stavins Speaker Kennedy School of Government
Richard K. Morse Speaker
Severin Borenstein Speaker Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Christopher Knittel Speaker Department of Economics, UC Davis

Frank Wolak

Stanford University 
Economics Department 
579 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305-6072 

Website: https://fawolak.org/

(650) 724-1712 (650) 724-1717
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in Economics
Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
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Frank A. Wolak is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His fields of specialization are Industrial Organization and Econometric Theory. His recent work studies methods for introducing competition into infrastructure industries -- telecommunications, electricity, water delivery and postal delivery services -- and on assessing the impacts of these competition policies on consumer and producer welfare. He is the Chairman of the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator for electricity supply industry in California. He is a visiting scholar at University of California Energy Institute and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Professor Wolak received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Harvard University and his B.A. from Rice University.

Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
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Matt Kahn Speaker Institute of the Environment and Department of Economics, UCLA
Conferences

PESD researcher Varun Rai to speak at UCLA School of Law's India and Climate Change conference

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The UCLA School of Law’s India and Climate Change conference will be held on Friday, April 9, 2010.

PESD researcher Varun Rai will be a panelist on the challenges for domestic progress in India on climate and energy questions along with Ann Carlson (UCLA School of Law), Anjali Jaiswal (NRDC), and Armin Rosencranz (Stanford University).

This event will bring together non-profit groups, policy analysts, and legal and political science scholars working both in the U.S. and in India on climate change issues for an all-day symposium examining how India will affect, and be affected by, climate change.  Panels will focus on promising routes for engaging with India post-Copenhagen; challenges for domestic progress in India on climate and energy; and the intersection of international trade law and climate questions in India-US relations.

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Markets, Information, and the Spreading of Risks: The Economic Meltdown and Organizational Theory

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Abstract
Social science interpretations of the meltdown emphasize system characteristics such as complexity and coupling, and/or culture as in neo-institutional theories.  Examining regulatory changes, regulatory agents, elected representatives, firms and the many warnings, I argue that the role of human agents has been greatly neglected. Building on earlier work on "executive failure" I offer an agentic interpretation that is missing from both of the social science interpretations. Structure (systems) and culture (neo institutional theory) are valuable but incomplete.

Charles Perrow is an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and a visiting professor at CISAC in the winter and spring terms. Among his award-winning research is Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of American Capitalism (Princeton, 2002), and Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (Princeton, 1999). His recent articles include "Modeling Firms in the Global Economy," Theory and Society, 2009, v 38:3, May, 217-243, "Organizations and Global Warming," in Constance Lever-Tracy, ed. Handbook of Society and Climate change (Routledge, forthcoming, 2010), "Complexity, Catastrophe, and Modularity," Sociological Inquiry 78:2, May 2008 162-73; "Conservative Radicalism," Organization 15:2 2008 271-77; "Disasters Evermore? Reducing our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters," Social Research 75:3 Fall, 2008. His recent membership on a National Academy of Science panel on the possibilities of certifying software led to his current work on cyber security. He is also writing on the economic meltdown, but his major interest now is the institutional/organizational aspects of global warming. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, all in sociology.

Kenneth Arrow is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research, emeritus; a CHP/PCOR fellow; and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has been primarily in economic theory and operations, focusing on areas including social choice theory, risk bearing, medical economics, general equilibrium analysis, inventory theory, and the economics of information and innovation. He was one of the first economists to note the existence of a learning curve, and he also showed that under certain conditions an economy reaches a general equilibrium. In 1972, together with Sir John Hicks, he won the Nobel Prize in economics, for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.

Arrow has served on the economics faculties of the University of Chicago, Harvard and Stanford. Prior to that, he served as a weather officer in the U.S. Air Corps (1942-46), and a research associate at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics (1947-49). In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has received the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He received a BS from City College, an MA and PhD from Columbia University, and holds approximately 20 honorary degrees.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Charles Perrow CISAC Visiting Professor Speaker
Kenneth Arrow Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research, Emeritus and CHP/PCOR Fellow; FSI Senior Fellow by courtesy Speaker
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Associate Director Mark Thurber traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland to meet with Wood Mackenzie

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Mark Thurber met with Wood Mackenzie, a leading oil and gas research and consultancy company based in Edinburgh, Scotland. During this visit Mark gave a presentation on conclusions drawn from PESD research on national oil companies, engaging in a fruitful dialogue on the subject with Wood Mackenzie experts.
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An article by PESD research fellow Varun Rai and affiliated faculty David Victor featured in the First Quarter 2010 issue of IAEE Energy Forum

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The First Quarter 2010 issue of the International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) Energy Forum has published an article written by PESD research fellow Varun Rai and PESD affiliated faculty David G. Victor. This issue of the forum  looks at the far east, particularly China and India. There are six articles that look at multiple facets of energy economics in that area and the forum will continue with this focus in the second quarter issue.

Rai and Victor's article titled "Identifying Viable Options in Developing Countries for Climate Change Mitigation: The Case of India" offers a framework for identifying viable and credible climate change mitigation actions in developing countries. The framework is applied to the case of India to suggest that a large number of options to control warming gases are in India's own self-interest, and that leverage on emissions from each of these options could amount to several hundred million tons of CO2 annually over the next decade and an even larger quantity by 2030.

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IAEE Rai Victor Identifing Viable Options
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A Sea Change in Proliferation: the Examples of Iran and Burma

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Abstract
The Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Zangger Committee, and the Missile Technology Control Regime are all "supply-side" nonproliferation regimes.  They were created when "high-tech" really was limited to a few countries and tightening export controls really could reduce proliferation.  For instance, Saddam Hussein's long-range missile development programs signed contracts with proliferation profiteers specifying that all components and infrastructure must come from a small set of Western countries whose names were explicitly listed in the contract.  Today, precision engineering has spread throughout the world to such an extent that A. Q. Khan can have aerospace-quality aluminum cast in Singapore and precisely machined in Malaysia for centrifuges destined for Libya.

This irrevocable spread of technology-and precision engineering is a prime example of a technology that is vital to the economic future of developing countries as well as an enabler of proliferation-is changing the environment nonproliferation regimes must work in.  How dependent developing countries are today on imports of components, materials, or just "know-how" will determine how well our supply-side regimes can still function.  The examples of Iran and Burma, two nations seeking long range missiles, are examined to see how the infrastructure and know-how for WMD is acquired today by two countries with very different levels of technology and capability.  While their missile programs are the explicit subject of this talk, the results could have profound implications for other WMD technologies that are dominated by precision engineering such as centrifuge production for uranium enrichment.

Geoffrey Forden has been at MIT since 2000 where his research includes the analysis of Russian and Chinese space systems as well as trying to understand how proliferators acquire the know-how and industrial infrastructure to produce weapons of mass destruction.  In 2002-2003, Dr. Forden spent a year on leave from MIT serving as the first Chief of Multidiscipline Analysis Section for UNMOVIC, the UN agency responsible for verifying and monitoring the dismantlement of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Previous to coming to MIT, he was a strategic weapons analyst in the National Security Division of the Congressional Budget Office after having worked at a number of international particle accelerator centers.

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Geoffrey Forden Research Associate Speaker Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group, MIT
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