PHD advising
I advise PhD students at UCSB's Bren School and Economics Department. I train students who want a rigorous grounding in economics and/or in interdisciplinary environmental science and management. Most of my students are in the Bren/Econ PhD Emphasis in Economics and Environmental Science. Please email me to discuss whether the Bren or Econ PhD program is better suited for your interests.
ECON 260B Environmental Economics (PhD, Dept. of Economics) [Syllabus]
This PhD-level course covers key theoretical and empirical results in environmental economics. It focuses on how theoretical insights can inform and be subjected to rigorous empirical tests. Theoretical topics include optimal environmental policy; cost-effective environment policy and instrument choice; second-best environment policy; equilibrium sorting; directed technical change; trade and environmental policy. Empirical applications include hedonic, cost of illness, sorting, and sufficient statistic methods.
ESM 229 Economics and Policy of Climate Change (Masters, Bren School) [Syllabus]
Anthropogenic climate change presents some of the biggest challenges facing modern society. Economics provide a powerful intellectual foundation for understanding and analyzing many of these challenges, from how climate change arises as a problem to how policies can address it. This course employs insights and tools from economics to understand climate change impacts, the design of mitigation and adaptation policies, and the consequences of these policies. Special attention will be paid to ways in which climate impacts and policies could exacerbate or alleviate existing social inequities. Lectures are designed to help students become critically-minded practitioners of climate policy through the use of empirical evidence and economic reasoning. Additionally, problem sets expand students’ skillsets in statistical analysis and numerical modeling.
ECON 115 Environmental Economics (Undergraduate, Dept. of Economics) [Syllabus]
This course introduces students to key concepts in environmental economics and its application to environmental policy design. Topics include optimal environmental policy; cost-effective policy and instrument choice; and valuation techniques for environmental goods and services. We further cover timely environmental policy discussions in California, the U.S., and around the world.