5 Facts about Climate Policy: Cause for a Shift in Policy?

Myron Scholes
Global Markets Forum

March 4, 2010, 5:30–7 p.m., Northern Trust

Professor Michael Greenstone of MIT discussed the various and numerous challenges that face the global economy in light of the Copenhagen Climate Conference of 2009.

This event was part of the Initiative on Global Markets and was generously sponsored by Myron Scholes.

Speaker Profiles


Michael Greenstone is the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings. His research is focused on estimating the costs and benefits of environmental quality. He has worked extensively on the Clean Air Act and examined its impacts on air quality, manufacturing activity, housing prices, and infant mortality to assess its costs and benefits. He is currently engaged in a large-scale project to estimate the economic costs of climate change. Other current projects include examinations of: the benefits of the Superfund program; the economic and health impacts of indoor air pollution in Orissa, India; individuals’ revealed value of a statistical life; the impact of air pollution on infant mortality in developing countries; and the costs of biodiversity.

Greenstone is also interested in the consequences of government regulation, more generally. He is conducting or has conducted research on: the effects of federal antidiscrimination laws on black infant mortality rates; the impacts of mandated disclosure laws on equity markets; and the welfare consequences of state and local subsidies given to businesses that locate within their jurisdictions.

He is a member of the Environmental Economics Advisory Committee of EPA’s Science Advisory Board, and his research has been funded by the NSF, NIH, and EPA. In 2004, Greenstone received the 12th Annual Kenneth J. Arrow Award for Best Paper in the Field of Health Economics. He is currently an editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics.

Greenstone received a PhD in economics from Princeton University and a bachelor’s degree in economics with high honors from Swarthmore College.

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