- GitHub Website [All course material posted here]
- Canvas Website [UMN students only; assignments uploaded here]
I am grateful to Louis Preonas, Kelsey Jack, and Jennifer Alix-Garcia for providing reference material.
This is a graduate field course on the intersection of Environmental Economics and Development Economics. New research in applied microeconomics is bringing together these two fields. We will explore key themes underpinning environment and development and read papers at the research frontier. At the end, you will be able to answer the following questions:
- How does economic development affect the environment, and vice versa?
- Why is environmental quality low in developing countries?
- What are the costs of low environmental quality in developing countries?
- Why is willingness to pay for environmental quality so low in developing countries?
- What are the political economy barriers to environmental protection?
Throughout the semester, we will alternate between two perspectives: (i) the development economist focusing on relationships between growth, poverty, market failures, public good provision, and environmental externalities; and (ii) the environmental economist focusing on the unique challenges of correcting externalities in poor countries.
Since there is no textbook, I have organized the course around the central themes. Within each theme, we will dissect research papers that combine some theory with a variety of research designs, identification strategies, and estimation techniques. While the course is aimed at students planning to do research in environment/development, my goal is to help advance your training as applied microeconomists in general, by showing (i) what makes a successful research question, and (ii) what passes for credible empirics these days.
The syllabus is linked here, and includes the grade breakdown, course policies, and the reading list
Lectures are split into modules. For the most part, each module will consist of two lectures.
- Module 1: Introduction (slides)
- Module 2: Impact of economic development on the environment (slides)
- Module 3: Impact of the environment on economic development (slides)
- Module 4: Why is WTP for environmental quality so low in developing countries? (slides)
- Module 5: Environmental policy in developing countries (slides)
- Module 6: Political economy of the environment (slides)
- Module 7: Climate Migration (slides)
Assignments are posted in the assignments folder.
- Assignment 1: Class Presentations
- Assignment 2: Replication Exercise
- Assignment 3: Research Proposal
- Assignment 4: Peer Review
This course repository is a work in progress and will be updated each time I teach the course (every two years).
If you just want to read the material, you can click the lectures folder. All slide decks are available as pdf files. If you want to run the code and generate the slides yourself, you will need to clone the repo and run the R markdown files on your local machine.
Yes! Since this is a (relatively) new field, I believe it is important to make material publicly available so that environment/development economics can be taught more effectively. If you do use the material, I kindly request that you: 1) let me know by email that you did so, and 2) provide an acknowledgment in your syllabus somewhere.