The LBJ School, UT Economics, and the McCombs department of Business, Government and Society will be hosting an Environmental Economics research series over the course of the Fall 2024 semester. Come hear from academics and subject matter experts in the field including:
- September 6th: Equity and Risk in the Social Cost of Carbon: Evidence from GIVE featuring Brian Prest
- October 4th: Power Flows: Transmission Lines, Allocative Efficiency, and Corporate Profits featuring Catherine Hausman
- November 1st: Major/Minor Thresholds in Environmental Regulation, featuring Tihitina Andarge
- November 15th: Drained Away: Oil Lost from First Nations Reserves, featuring Lucija Muehlenbachs
- December 6th: Richard Sweeney, Department of Economics, Boston College
Series Speakers
Brian C. Prest, Fellow; Director, Social Cost of Carbon Initiative
Brian Prest is an economist and fellow at RFF specializing in the economics of climate change, energy economics, and oil and gas supply. Prest uses economic theory and econometrics to improve the design of energy and environmental policies. His recent work includes improving the scientific basis of the social cost of carbon and economic modeling of various policies around oil and gas supply. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. His work has also been featured in popular press outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Economist, Reuters, the Associated Press, and Barron’s.
Catherine Hausman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, University of Michigan
Catherine H. Hausman is an associate professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. Her work focuses on environmental and energy economics. Recent projects have looked at inequality and environmental quality, the natural gas sector's role in methane leaks, the impact of climate change on the electricity grid, and the effects of nuclear power plant closures. Her research has appeared in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Prior to her graduate studies, Catherine studied in Peru under a Fulbright grant. She has taught statistics, a policy seminar on energy and the environment, and a course on government regulation of industry and the environment. She holds a BA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Tihitina Andarge, Assistant Professor of Resource Economics, UMass Amhert
Tihitina Andarge is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Resource Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She's an environmental economist with secondary interests in development economics. Her research focuses on various aspects of policy implementation: monitoring and enforcement, manipulable thresholds, environmental justice, information, and environmental health. She examines these issues in the context of water pollution regulations but her work has implications for other media.
Her recent papers examine the impact of incomplete enforcement information on compliance and ambient pollution levels within the context of water quality regulations. Relatedly, she is part of a team of researchers developing an integrated assessment model to quantify the economic benefits of water quality.
Lucija Muehlenbachs, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Calgary
Dr. Lucija Muehlenbachs is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary and a University Fellow at Resources for the Future. She has published extensively on the oil and gas industry, on topics such as the likelihood of inactive wells being reactivated, methane leaks from the distribution system, the impact of wells on property prices, the impacts of traffic accidents associated with shale gas truck traffic, a characterization of the chemical composition of shale gas wastewater, and the water quality impacts on rivers and streams. These papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the International Economic Review among other journals. She has also served as co-editor at the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and Resource and Energy Economics, and on the editorial boards of the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics, and the Canadian Journal of Economics. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Alberta and a doctoral degree in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Maryland.
Richard L. Sweeney, Associate Professor, Boston College
Richard Sweeney is Associate Professor in the Economics Department at Boston College. His research interests lie at the intersection of industrial organization, environmental economics and energy policy. Rich's interests typically lie at the intersection of environmental economics and energy policy. He graduated from Boston College in 2004 with a B.S. in Economics and Political Science, and then studied post-Communist transition at C.E.R.G.E. in the Czech Republic on a Fulbright scholarship. Rich also spent two years as a research assistant at Resources for the Future, where his research involved electricity regulation, climate policy design and the economics of renewable energy.