Environmental Economy

Objectives

This course presents the main theoretical and empirical tools for understanding environmental and resource economics. It will make use of microeconomic, macroeconomic and statistical analysis and will incorporate real-world examples. After a brief introduction, the class will be divided into three parts. The first part will be devoted to the analysis of the market failures in the presence of environmental externalities such as pollution and the different instruments the governments can use to correct those market failures. Then, natural resource management and sustainability issues will be presented in the second part of the class. Finally, the third part of the class will be devoted to environmental valuation. More precisely, the different tools used by economists to give a value to environment and amenities will be presented.

Course outline

Chapter 1: Introduction to environmental and resource economics

Chapter 2: Environmental regulation

Chapter 3: Natural resource management and sustainability

Chapter 4: Environmental evaluation

Prerequisites

​Economics: Introduction to public economics, growth theory
Econometrics: OLS regression, probit regression, logit regression