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Michael Greenstone Greenstone
Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and the Faculty Director of TCD at UChicago and Energy Policy Institute at UChicago. His research largely focuses on environmental and energy economics. Prior to rejoining the faculty at Chicago, he was the 3M Professor of Economics at MIT. Among his many honours, he is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Faculty Director of the E2e Project; Director of the Climate Change, Environment and Natural Resources Research Programme of the International Growth Centre; a Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution; and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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; individual’s revealed value of a statistical life; the impact of air pollution on life expectancies in China; the efficacy of environmental regulations in India; and the costs and benefits of an emissions trading market in India. Greenstone is also interested in the consequences of government regulation, more generally. He is conducting or has conducted research on: the effects of federal anti discrimination 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 served as the Chief Economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors in the first year of his Administration. He also served as a member of the EPA Science Advisory Board’s Environmental Economics Advisory Committee. His research has been funded by the NSF, NIH, and EPA, as well as private foundations. In 2004, Professor Greenstone received the 12th Annual Kenneth J. Arrow Award for Best Paper in the Field of Health Economics. Greenstone received a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a B.A. in economics with High Honors from Swarthmore College.
Third-party environmental auditing
High levels of industrial pollution are a harmful by-product of growth. The Indian state of Gujarat is an industrial powerhouse with about 5% of the Indian population, but 9% of India’s registered manufacturing employment and 19% of output. This growth has been accompanied by a degradation of air and water quality.
Let Them Buy Light: The Welfare Benefits of Electricity for Rural Households and Enterprises
This project measured the welfare effects of increased access to electricity for rural households and micro-enterprises by letting them buy light. The research design experimentally offers off-grid, solar connections through a randomized - controlled trial and measures both the willingness to pay for connections and the welfare benefits of a connection once adopted, with special focus on the productivity and education effects that bear on economic growth. Findings inform the formulation of sensible rural electrification policies and inform implementation issues.
Learnings from emissions trade in India
India, and many developing nations in other parts of the world take solace in the U-shaped Kuznets curve: a belief in this inverse relationship between income and environmental quality results in not enough efforts being made to tackle pollution and environmental degradation in these countries. There is an urgent need for policy which can protect societies and people from the adverse effects of climate change. In this edition of I4I Conversations, Anant Sudarshan and Michael Greenstone discuss their work as environmental economists, and the many ways in which they have been able to use research to help guide policy. This includes their work on emissions trading in Surat, the cap-and-trade market in Gujarat, and clean cookstoves in Orissa. In that context, they list some of the difficulties with environmental regulation, such as the reluctance to install emissions monitors and falsification of the readings. They also delve into the trade-off between finding energy sources that are ...
Learnings from emissions trade in India
India, and many developing nations in other parts of the world take solace in the U-shaped Kuznets curve: a belief in this inverse relationship between income and environmental quality results in not enough efforts being made to tackle pollution and environmental degradation in these countries. There is an urgent need for policy which can protect societies and people from the adverse effects of climate change. In this edition of I4I Conversations, Anant Sudarshan and Michael Greenstone discuss their work as environmental economists, and the many ways in which they have been able to use research to help guide policy. This includes their work on emissions trading in Surat, the cap-and-trade market in Gujarat, and clean cookstoves in Orissa. In that context, they list some of the difficulties with environmental regulation, such as the reluctance to install emissions monitors and falsification of the readings. They also delve into the trade-off between finding energy sources that are ...
Clearing the air: The effects of transparency on plant pollution emissions
Of the 20 cities in the world with the worst fine particulate air pollution, 13 are in India. If good information on who pollutes is available, then traditional environmental regulation can bring down emissions somewhat, but regulators may lack the will or resources to penalise every polluter. What more can government due to contain such widespread damages? This project measuring the effect of information disclosure on emissions in a large-scale plant-level randomised controlled trial in India. In collaboration with the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board, it develops a star-rating programme that assigns plants to categories based on their recent air pollution emissions, which are either privately shared with the plant alone or publicly disclosed.
Star power: Rating industries in Maharashtra by emission levels
Maharashtra Pollution Control Board recently launched a programme to rate industries based on their emission levels – the first such initiative by a government regulator. An easy and accessible way to inform residents about industry emissions around where they live and work, Greenstone, Pande, Ryan and Sudarshan contend that the programme can infuse transparency and accountability into the system, and instil healthy competition among industries.
Indian Climate Early Warning System
This project involves the development of a spatially-disaggregated Indian Climate Early Warning System. For any given current weather realisation, the Early Warning System will produce maps that display locations of risks across India in various economic sectors.
Improved cooking stoves in India: Evaluating long-run impacts
Improved cooking stoves are increasingly seen as an important technology to address indoor air pollution. While laboratory experiments have shown that they could have big effects on smoke exposure and emissions, this column finds limited long-run health and environmental impacts of an improved cooking stove programme in Odisha. This indicates the importance of testing interventions in real-world conditions taking into account willingness to pay, usage, and changes over time.
Building Environmental Regulation that Enables Growth
This project is linked to a broader research-policy collaboration with India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), and State Pollution Control Boards of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu to design, implement and evaluate an emissions market for particulate matter (PM) emissions in India, a pollutant of serious concern.
Has environmental regulation been successful in India?
India has an impressive number of environmental regulations – but have they been a success? This column presents evidence that while initiatives such as catalytic converters for cars have reduced air pollution, there has been far less success in tackling water pollution. It argues that regulators will only be effective when they are given enough power and legitimacy.
Emissions Trading as an Environmental Innovation in India: Measuring the Policy Impact on Emissions and Abatement Costs
Growth in developing countries has improved living standards of millions, but has led to high pollution concentrations and serious public health damages. Market-based environmental regulation can reduce the costs of pollution reduction and thus transform the trade-off between environmental quality and growth.