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, where he proposed and then co-led the development of the United States Government’s social cost of carbon. 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. Formerly, Greenstone was the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT and directed The Hamilton Project.

Greenstone’s research, which has influenced policy in the United States and globally, is focused on the global energy challenge that requires all societies to balance the needs for inexpensive and reliable energy, protection of the public’s health from air pollution, and minimizing the damages from climate change. Recently, his research has helped lead to the United States Government quadrupling its estimate of the damages from climate change, the adoption of pollution markets in India, and the use of machine learning techniques to target environmental inspections. As a co-director of the Climate Impact Lab, he is producing empirically grounded estimates of the local and global impacts of climate change. He created the Air Quality Life Index® that converts air pollution concentrations into their impact on life expectancy and co-founded Climate Vault, a 501(c)(3) that uses markets to allow institutions and people to reduce their carbon footprint and foster innovation in carbon dioxide removal.

Greenstone received a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and a B.A. in Economics with High Honors from Swarthmore College.

SPEAKERS AND CHAIRS:

Richard Damania is the Chief Economist of the Sustainable Development Practice Group, effective March 1, 2020.  He has held several positions in the World Bank including as Senior Economic Advisor in the Water Practice, Lead Economist in the Africa Region’s Sustainable Development Department, in the South Asia and Latin America and Caribbean Regions of the World Bank.  His work has spanned multiple sectors and has helped the World Bank become an acknowledged thought leader on matters relating to environment, water, and the economy. Prior to joining the World Bank, he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Adelaide.  He has published extensively with over 100 papers in scientific journals, has held numerous advisory positions with governments and in international organizations, and serves on the Editorial Board of several prestigious scientific journals.

Rémi Jedwab is a professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Elliott School and the Department of Economics of George Washington University, the Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy, and the Director of the ESIA Initiative on Climate Change and Sustainable Cities at George Washington University, and an Affiliated Scholar of the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University. Professor Jedwab's main fields of research are urban and real estate economics, development and growth, and environmental economics. Some of the issues he has studied include urbanization and structural transformation, urban construction and climate change, the economic determinants and effects of transportation infrastructure, and the roles of institutions, human capital and technology in development and growth. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the World Bank-GWU Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Conference and the Washington Area Development Economics Symposium.

 

Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Virginia

 

Sheetal Sekhri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at University of Virginia, an affiliate of the International Growth Centre (IGC), and a Giorgio Ruffalo Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School (2012-2013). Sekhri received her PhD from Brown University in 2008. Her research focuses on the delivery of public services and safety nets, higher education and skill development, and water related issues in India. Her past research has examined the role of informal networks in improving take-up in the public distribution system in India and understanding the returns to public college attendance in Indian labour markets. Current projects involve evaluating the implications of regulatory capture for groundwater depletion in India and implications of improvement in public distribution system for women’s health. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.