Instructor of Record, Spring 2025, College of Charleston
Course Description: This course explores global challenges of sustainable development: the relationship between environmental crises and our collective well-being. Our primary means of doing so will be through close readings and exploration of ongoing research in development economics, environmental economics, and the intersection of the two. Thematic topics will include protected areas, land use, the social cost of carbon, water scarcity, payments for ecosystem services, and more. Our focus will be on research in the Global South, but in doing so, will explore questions of international inequities, poverty, and global environmental justice. While we will study and understand methods of economics, we will also integrate broader perspectives on the nature of development and environmental crises, including from the other social sciences. This holistic perspective will bring us to fundamental questions in the field: What types of policies and institutions ensure a path to global prosperity and sustainability? What mechanisms of international cooperation can set us down that path? Undergraduate level.
Instructor of Record, Spring 2025, College of Charleston
Course Description: This course serves as an introduction to interdisciplinary environmental studies. The course will utilize approaches from the natural and applied sciences, humanities, and social sciences to investigate human-nature interactions to provide a foundation from which students across disciplines can build a deeper understanding of the interconnected nature of the environment and society. Instruction will be given through mixed formats: traditional lectures using PowerPoint and note-taking, videos and other media, in-class activities and discussions that all require your active engagement to get the most from this learning endeavor. We will switch between our discipline-centric perspectives during the course of the semester, yet we will emphasize their points of overlap and intersection. Undergraduate level.
Instructor of Record, Spring 2023, Duke University
Teaching Assistant, Spring 2022, Duke University
Course Description: Teaches basic economic literacy and introduces environmental and natural resource issues through the lens of economics. Analyzes incentives and decisions of individuals, firms, and governments and how they interact with the natural environment. Examples include a consumer deciding to purchase organic produce, a firm deciding to install pollution control technology, a government choosing to regulate a carcinogenic chemical, and group of nations deciding to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Stresses command of economic reasoning and analytical tools as ways to understand why people and governments do what they do and how policies might better address the needs of society. Lead instructor, Spring 2023, Teaching Assistant, Spring 2022. Undergraduate level.
Teaching Assistant, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2023, Duke University
Course Description: This course provides a survey of environmental economics. The course covers conceptual and methodological topics and applies these skills to current issues in environmental and resource policy. The first part of the course focuses on basic theory and methods of economic analysis of environmental problems. What is the efficient level of environmental protection? How does cost-benefit analysis help determine efficient policies? How is cost-benefit analysis implemented? The second part of the course focuses on the economics of the environment, particularly the economics of pollution control. We will evaluate several different methods for pollution control from an economic perspective. Masters level.
Course Description: Economic analysis of environmental policies typically involves a quantitative comparison of the benefits and costs of environmental protection. ENV 531 focuses on the benefits side: the valuation of changes in environmental quality. It covers the theoretical foundations of major nonmarket valuation methods and, through a series of problem sets, provides students with opportunities to develop their skills applying those methods. It also covers a range of regression methods commonly employed in valuation studies, including ordinary least squares (OLS), poisson and negative binomial, seemingly unrelated regression, instrumental variables, logit and probit, and conditional logit. Although the course is heavily quantitative, it has value even for students who do not intend to conduct applied environmental economics studies, as it will help them become more knowledgeable users of the results of such studies.