Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The analysis of the role of the natural environment in economic system. All economic activity creates waste products (pollution) which must be disposed of back into the natural environment. The socially efficient amount of waste generation and disposal is determined and methods of reaching this level evaluated. This involves the theoretical and empirical determination of the costs and benefits of waste generation and a thorough discussion of the role of government policies: taxes, standards, tradeable emission permits versus private market initiatives (bargaining and green goods) under a variety of assumptions about the economic system. Equivalent Courses: ECON911

COURSE DETAILS:

My weekly office hours are Thursday 10:30 – 11:30 am. Also, feel free to email me at Hendrik_Wolff@sfu.ca for any research or course related questions. 

Course goals and course description:  The field of environmental economics examines how environmental resources (e.g. clean air, water, greenhouse gases) are developed and managed. This course aims at equipping students with economic methods and tools to empirically analyze basic environmental issues. This is important because over the next years, policymakers will have to make crucial decisions that will define the future of the environment, transportation and energy. Here are some of the questions and issues that will guide this course: The way we commute, drive and which energy sources society will use in 10 or 30 years will likely be fundamentally different from today. Will it be the electric car, public transportation, solar energy or natural gas? How will cities adapt to the challenges of increasing urbanization and air pollution? How do firms and households respond to incentives, policy instruments and new technologies? What are the consequences in terms of air quality, health and economic well-being? These are important questions that environmental economists try to answer. This course hence combines briefer theoretical analysis with more in depths discussions on specific environmental policies as applied to air pollution, energy, climate change, quality of life and human health issues. Within these examples, particular topics that will be covered are the concepts of sustainability, microeconomic analysis of environmental regulation, the problem of social cost, policy instrument choice, and estimating costs and benefits of environmental improvements via revealed preferences, hedonic analysis. 

Active student participation is key to the course. By going through the recent empirical literature, students are expected to critically present articles, partially re-estimate results of existing empirical work and summarize findings in class presentations. This critical assessment of the literature will at the same time be useful for the student to develop their own research idea. So the central part of this course is that the student develops a research idea and writes one final student research paper. 

The Course requires a Student Paper

Students are required to write a short, paper on a specific empirical environmental issue. The basis for the paper can either be your own research idea (ENCOURAGED, especially for any PhD student) OR come from either a recent journal article in today’s top journal in economics (American Economic Review, Quarterly Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, Economic Journal, ReStat etc.). If you choose an article from a different journal, please discuss this with the instructor first. The student paper should then critically elaborate on the following four points

• what does the article contribute to the literature?
• why is it important?
• Method1: What is the research design? How does the author identify the CAUSAL effect of X on Y.
• Method2: What are the advantages and of the papers approach (/empirical model/data collection etc.).
• Method3: What are the disadvantages and what of the papers approach ?
• Method4: How could one improve the paper? You have to be constructive here: What alternatives method approaches do you have in mind?
• How robust are the results, including re-estimation of the results?
• what lessons can we learn from the economics analysis (i.e. what are the policy recommendations, what are the lessons learned for this research literature/agenda more broadly or what are the new insights for the business world etc.).

In class we will go over specific examples that exemplify this student paper project in more detail. The main text should be double-spaced.

If it is your own research idea, I (obviously) don’t expect a paper ready to be submitted to a journal by the end of the quarter. However, data should have been collected (that mostly takes the LONGEST time!!). If for some reason, not all data have been collected, at least the “feasibility” of the data collection MUST be demonstrated (i.e. a written promise by an agency that data will be provided to you by date XY), your hypothesis, importantly your research design and econometric identification must be clearly shown and discussed.

The page limit of 20 pages applies to the text only. In addition, you can add Figures and Tables in an Appendix. (The appendix has no page limit).

A specific reading list will be handed out in class, which will include the following topics:

Empirical Modelling/Identification Techniques
      Differences in Differences
      Regression Discontinuity
      Instrumental Variables
      Matching
Real Estate Hedonics and Environmental Amenities
The Economics of Climate Change and Agriculture
The Economics of Climate Change and Quality of Life
Estimating Energy Demand
Environmental Health
Causes and Consequences of Air Pollution
Transportation and Traffic Restrictions
Transportation and Mobility as a Service Policies
Economics of Autonomous Vehicles

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: