AEM 7510 - Environmental Economics

Spring. 4 credits. S–U or letter grades.

Prerequisites: ECON 6090 and graduate-level econometrics course.

A. Bento.

The objective of this course is to provide a graduate-level survey of the two prevailing contemporary themes in environmental economics: the measurement of the demand for environmental resources as input into benefit-cost analyses, and the design of incentive-based, cost-effective policy instruments to achieve environmental goals. Core topics include market failure, conceptual foundations for valuing changes in environmental quality, empirical applications of nonmarket valuation methods, and cost-effective market mechanism design for reducing pollution. Additional topics include information asymmetries and mechanism design for nonpoint source pollution, and international/global environmental issues.