The Economics of Sustainable Development

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. In addition, he serves as faculty director of the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and was recently announced as the founding director of the University’s new energy and climate institute. He was previously the director of the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics. During the Obama Administration, he served as the Chief Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, a Carnegie Fellow (aka the “Brainy Award”), and a former editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Greenstone received a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and a B.A. in Economics with High Honors from Swarthmore College.

Nick is an Associate Professor of Economics. He studies energy markets and environmental regulation in developing countries. Energy use enables high standards of living, but rapid, energy-intensive growth has caused many environmental problems in turn. Nick’s research measures how energy use and pollution emissions respond to regulation and market incentives. His work includes empirical studies of the effect of power grid capacity on electricity prices, how firms make decisions about energy-efficiency and how environmental regulation can be designed to best abate pollution at low social cost. Recent research studies the adoption and pricing of renewable energy in developing countries. He received a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 and a BA in Economics summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. He previously worked as a Research Associate in the Capital Markets group at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, DC.

Vittorio Bassi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. He is also a Lead Academic of the Uganda Country Team of the International Growth Center, as well as a CEPR and CEGA Affiliate. His main research interests are in labor markets and productivity in developing countries. Vittorio completed his PhD in Economics at University College London in 2017.

Susanna B. Berkouwer is an Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Their research spans environmental economics and development economics, with projects studying energy efficiency adoption, carbon offsets, electricity grids, and air pollution from energy usage. They are a Faculty Research Fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research, an affiliate with J-PAL and with BREAD, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Development Economics. Susanna holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and an MA from Yale University. 

Fiona Burlig is an Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, an NBER Faculty Research Fellow, a BREAD affiliate, and Deputy Faculty Director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC)-India. She is an applied microeconomist with research interests in and at the intersection of energy, environmental, and resource economics and development economics. Prior to joining Harris, she was a postdoc in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in economics, political science, and German from Williams College.

Mathilda Eriksson is an environmental economist with a wide range of interests related to climate change mitigation and adaptation. One strand of her research builds on policy-optimization models that integrate climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis to assess the welfare implications of different policy alternatives. Another strand of her research is empirical and aims to quantify the losses from extreme weather events and the extent to which policy interventions can reduce these losses.

She is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Maurice R. Greenberg School of Risk Science and the Department of Economics at Georgia State University. Her experience outside academia includes working as an economist at the Swedish National Institute of Economic Research and as a consultant for the World Bank.

Ben Groom is currently the Dragon Capital Chair in Biodiversity Economics at the Department of Economics, University of Exeter. Between 2012 and 2020 Ben was a Professor of Environment and Development Economics at the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Ben studied a BSc in Economics at Sheffield University, an MSC in Environmental and Resource Economics at UCL, and completed his PhD in Economics at UCL in 2005 on the topic of empirical and theoretical aspects of social discounting for distant time horizons.

Ben has a professional background working in environmental and development economics, having spent 2 years as an Overseas Development Institute (ODI) fellow between 1998 and 2000. Since then his work on social discounting has informed government policy guidance in the US, UK, Norway and the Netherlands, inter alia, and also OECD guidance on Cost Benefit Analysis for transport projects. Ben acted as a consultant for numerous international organizations, including the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the OECD and the WWF.

Namrata Kala is an Associate Professor in Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her research interests are in environmental, development, and organizational economics. Her current research projects include studying how firms adapt to environmental change and regulation, the returns to environmental technologies, and the returns to worker training and incentives.  She received her PhD in environmental economics from Yale University. Namrata is the Scientific Advisor of J-PAL South Asia's Air and Water Lab, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an affiliate with the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), and Joint Managing Editor of Economic Journal.

Molly Lipscomb is an associate professor of public policy and economics and the director of the Center for Social Innovation at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Lipscomb’s research focuses primarily on environmental issues in developing countries and adaptation to lack of centralized health and sanitation services.  She has analyzed the incentives to pollute near downstream borders, the impact of access to electricity on human development and poverty indicators, the impact of increased agricultural productivity on deforestation, the effectiveness of auctions in reducing prices for sanitation services, and methods of targeting subsidies to households to increase take-up of improved sanitation services.

Lipscomb received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2009 and has served as a consultant at the World Bank and a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.

Robyn Meeks is the Mark and Lynne Florian Assistant Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and a faculty affiliate of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability and the Duke Center for International Development. Professor Meeks is on the Faculty Advisory Committee of the James E. Rogers Energy Access Project at Duke. Her research is at the intersection of environmental and development economics with much of her work focusing on understanding individual and household responses to the introduction of various water and energy technologies, policies, and types of infrastructure in developing countries. Professor Meeks has implemented field research in a number of countries, including India, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, Kenya, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Peru.

Kyle Meng is an Associate Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Management and the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Climate and Energy Program Director at the Environmental Markets Solutions Lab, and recently served as Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Dr. Meng studies the equity and efficiency consequences of climate policies and has published in leading economics and science journals. He received his PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University and his Bachelor’s in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University. A first-generation immigrant, he was a recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Vaios Triantafyllou is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Cornell University, where his work focuses primarily on the distributional effects of the green transition. He is particularly interested in the transitional costs for workers, as well as the impacts of environmental regulation in developed countries on populations and firms in their developing trade partners. He has an engineering background, with a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from Harvard University and a master’s in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Eric Zou is an Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Zou studies the economics of pollution prevention in China and the United States. His current work targets emerging sources of pollution, evaluates their impacts on human and ecosystem health, and explores regulatory and consumer technology solutions. Zou received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and holds a B.S. in Economics from East China Normal University.