Michael Greenstone

/

RDCEP co-Principal Investigator

The Milton Friedman Professor in Economics and the College | Director of the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago (EPIC), University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

  • Environmental and energy economics
  • Public economics
  • Development economics
  • Labor economics
  • Health economics

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Professor of Economics and Director of the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at Chicago (EPIC). His other current positions and affiliations include Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Editor of the Journal of Political Economy, Faculty Director of the E2e Project, Head of the JPAL Environment and Energy Program, and co-Director of the International Growth Centre’s Energy Research Programme. Prior to rejoining the faculty at Chicago, Professor Greenstone was the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT.

Greenstone’s research estimates the costs and benefits of environmental quality and society's energy choices. He has worked extensively on the Clean Air Act and examined its impacts on air quality, manufacturing activity, housing prices, and human health to assess its benefits and costs. He is currently engaged in large-scale projects to estimate the economic costs of climate change and to identify efficient approaches to mitigating these costs.

Greenstone also has extensive policy experience. He served as the Chief Economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009-10. In addition, he was the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, which studies a range of policies to promote broad-based economic growth, from 2010-2013 and has since joined its Advisory Council.

Greenstone received a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a BA in economics with High Honors from Swarthmore College.

For more information on Michael Greenstone, please visit: http://www.michaelgreenstone.com/

Amir Jina

/
amir.jpg

Assistant Professor, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago

 

Amir Jina is an Assistant Professor at University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, conducting interdisciplinary research on how economic and social development is shaped by the environment. He uses applied economic techniques, climate science, and remote sensing to understand the impacts of climate in both rich and poor countries, and has done fieldwork in India, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Uganda. Amir is a founding member of the Climate Impact Lab, an interdisciplinary collaboration estimating the Social Cost of Carbon with state-of-the-art empirical methods. Prior to University of Chicago, Amir was a visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley where he worked the Risky Business initiative. Amir received his Ph.D. in Sustainable Development and M.A. in Climate and Society from Columbia University, B.A.s in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from Trinity College, Dublin, and previously worked with the Red Cross/Red Crescent in South Asia and as a high school teacher in Japan.

Research Interests:

  • Environment and Environmental Change
  • Societal Development

Omobolanle Ajenifuja

/

Summer Scholar 2012

Omobolanle Ajenifuja is a rising junior at Lindblom Math and Science Academy.During this school year, she was in a colliquim class where the students worked with Meghan Vincent to answer the question 'Does Chicago spend more money in certian wards than others?". She has continued working to collect the data and she worked with Meghan Vincent collecting and analyzing data. 

"This summer has shown me how research is conducted. It has taught me a lot about energy and possible consqences about what we are doing to the environment. As result of this summer, my interest in field of energy and energy policy has grown.

Sou-Cheng (Terrya) Choi

/
choi

Research Scientist

Computation Institute

University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

  • Algorithms for large singular linear systems
  • Applied and computational mathematics
  • Industrial-grade software engineering

Choi currently focuses on computational issues and software design for solving scientific problems related to climate change and economic policies. She works on OSCEF, an open-source software framework and toolbox whose core is for formulating and solving large-scale computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, which are widely used in computational economics and climate policy analyses.  

In 2012, Choi was awarded the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra (SIAG/LA) Prize for the paper based on her doctoral dissertation, "MINRES-QLP: A Krylov Subspace Method for Indefinite or Singular Symmetric Systems," SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 33:1810-1836, 2011. The prize is awarded every three years by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and is considered one of the most prestigious prizes of its kind in the field. In 2007, Choi received Special Congressional Recognition from the U.S. House of Representatives for outstanding public service.

Choi received her PhD in Computational and Mathematical Engineering from the Stanford University. She was a Senior Member of Technical Staff with Oracle before joining the University of Chicago with a joint appointment in the Argonne National Laboratory.  Choi is a member of the SIAM, the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), and the Hong Kong Mathematical Society (HKMS).

Don Fullerton

/

Gutgsell Professor, Department of Finance and Institute of Government and Public Affairs

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Areas of Expertise:

  • Environmental and energy economics and policy analysis
  • Public economics and taxation
  • Distributional effects of taxes, social security, and regulations

Fullerton’s early research in public economics focused on computable general equilibrium models of taxation, marginal effective tax rates, the marginal cost of public funds, and distributional effects of taxes on a lifetime basis. His more recent research includes the distributional effects of social security. In environmental and energy economics, Fullerton works on household disposal of garbage and recycling, policies for green design, vehicle emission control policies, carbon taxes, and other policies in the energy sector where direct environmental taxes are not feasible.

Don Fullerton received a BA from Cornell in 1974 and a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley in 1978. He taught at Princeton University (1978-84), the University of Virginia (1984-91), Carnegie Mellon University (1991-94) and the University of Texas (1994-2008), before joining the University of Illinois in 2008. From 1985 to 1987, he served in the U.S. Treasury Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis.

Link: 

Don Fullerton's web site