| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
A Blueprint for Building Up Environmental Economics at USC
This blog post represents a piece of marketing and a commitment device. As I think about the next 3 to 5 years, I'd like to sketch out an optimistic vision for intellectual growth of USC Economics. In 2016, USC Economics is known for econometrics, behavioral economics, development economics and health economics. There are natural synergies between these fields and building up environmental economics.
Our plan is very simple;
1. Recruiting a new cohort of Ph.D students to USC Economics and the Price School — Antonio Bento and I will be writing a letter to all of our friends at the top 120 universities in the U.S and abroad alerting them about our ambitions. Frankly, it is now very difficult to be admitted to the very best universities (i.e Harvard, Stanford and MIT). This creates an opening for USC as we seek students who are eager to be well trained by our econometrics group but who seek to work on applied topics. We will ask the faculty we write to nudge their students to consider USC for a Ph.D.
2. Attracting Visiting Scholars and Post-Docs — USC has the funds and Los Angeles is just beautiful so it will be easy to attract very talented visitors to join for different lengths of time.
3. Creating research opportunities for undergraduates and graduate students — USC has a terrific Spatial Sciences Institute and I'm already employing students to work on my projects.
4. Raising private funds to build up environmental economics at USC.
5. Running a weekly environmental economics seminar (to see our first set of speakers click here).
6. Identifying units on campus who seek to build up in sustainability studies — cross-campus faculty appointments will become an attractive way to build up our capacity.
7. Teaching really good rigorous classes at both the undergraduate and graduate level — environmental studies doesn't have to be based on a set of tired “soft” political slogans. I would hope that both Gary Becker and Milton Friedman would respect what I teach when I give my environmental economics lectures (for a $1 taste order this).
8. Reaching out to the public — through editorial writing and community engage in Los Angeles.
When I worked at UCLA, I didn't have any of these opportunities. The UCLA School of Public Policy doesn't have a Ph.D. program and the Economics Department didn't view environmental economics as an exciting priority. There was a lot of talk about “Interdisciplinary studies” but few were actively engaged in it.
Source: http://greeneconomics.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-blueprint-for-building-up.html
