Day 1 Program and Speaker Bios

2023 Climate, Environment & Economic Growth Conference

Conference Synopsis

Day 1: The Future of Growth in the Climate Transition
Thursday, November 9, 2023

Halting the ongoing climate breakdown requires commitments from high-income countries to rapidly implement drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and commitments from low- and middle-income income countries to limit future emission increases. At the same time, politicians in both rich and poor countries cannot steer away from promising continued economic growth, as a widely accepted prerequisite for improving citizen welfare and reducing poverty. This conference asks whether it is possible to pursue global economic growth as currently defined and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions simultaneously, and, if so, what policies are required to achieve this – and if not, what economic and environmental targets our policies should aim for instead. Key themes for discussion will include:

  • The spatial and macro-economic implications of climate instability
  • Energy market policy in the renewable energy transition
  • Frictions in adaptation and policies to mitigate the increases in national and international inequality
  • How should redistributive climate transfers from rich to poor countries be designed?
  • Interdisciplinary research on the modelling of climate impacts with human/social feedback

Program Schedule

Thursday, November 9
Maurice R. Greenberg Conference Center (391 Prospect St)
(Please note that there will be a bus arriving at The Omni Hotel at 7:40am to take conference guests to the conference center)

8:00 - 8:30 am EST

Breakfast

8:30 - 10:30 am EST: Frictions in adaptation and environmental justice

10:30 - 11:00 am EST

Break

11:00 - 11:25 am EST

11:25 - 12:30 pm EST

12:30 - 1:30 pm EST

Lunch

1:30 - 3:00 pm EST: Renewable Energy Markets

3:00 - 3:15 pm EST

Break

3:15 - 4:45 pm EST: Macroeconomics of Climate Change

4:45 - 5:00 pm EST

Break

5:00 - 6:15 pm EST: Panel Discussion on Modelling Climate Impacts with Human/Social Feedback

6:15 - 7:30 pm EST

Reception
 

Speakers: 

Speaker Bio
Rohini Pande is the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics as well as the Director of the Economic Growth Center, and Faculty Director of Inclusion Economics, Yale University. She is a co-editor of American Economic Review: Insights. Pande studies how formal and informal institutions shape power relationships and patterns of economic, political, and environmental advantage in society, particularly in developing countries. She is interested the role of public policy in providing the poor and disadvantaged political and economic power, and how notions of economic justice and human rights can help justify and enable such change. 
Islamul Haque is a development economist with an interest in the economics of climate change adaptation in developing countries. His current research is focused on understanding the frictions that limit climate change adaptation in developing countries, designing solutions to address these challenges and generating evidence on their effectiveness and scaling complexities. He received his PhD in economics from University of Southern California. Currently, Islamul is a postdoctoral associate at Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). 
Kelsey Jack is an Associate Professor at the Bren School and the Dept. of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is  co-chair the Environment and Energy sector at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT (J-PAL),  an affiliate of the Environmental Markets Lab at UCSB (emLab) and an associate editor at the American Economic Review and Econometrica. Kelsey's research is at the intersection of environmental and development economics, with a focus on how individuals, households, and communities decide to use natural resources and provide public goods.
​​​​ Gregory Lane is an Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. His current research focuses on innovations in finance and technology, and labor markets in developing countries. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an affiliate at J-PAL. Prior to joining Harris, he was an Assistant Professor at American University.
Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History, and current chair of the South Asian Studies Council. His research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia. Amrith’s areas of particular interest include environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health. Amrith is the recipient of the 2022 Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for History, a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities. His work on environmental justice received a “scientific breakthrough of the year” award from the Falling Walls Foundation in 2022.
Lucas Chancel’s work focuses on global inequality and environmental policy. Lucas is an Associate Professor of Economics with tenure at Sciences Po, affiliated with the Center for Research on Social Inequalities and the Department of Economics. He is also Co-Director and Senior Economist at the World Inequality Lab at the Paris Scool of Economics (PSE). In 2023-24, he teaches at Harvard Kennedy School as a visiting Associate Professor.
Nicholas Ryan studies energy markets and environmental regulation in developing countries. Energy use enables high standards of living but rapid, energy-intensive growth has caused many environmental problems in turn. Nick’s research measures how energy use and pollution emissions respond to regulation and market incentives. His work includes empirical studies of the effect of power grid capacity on electricity prices, how firms make decisions about energy-efficiency and how environmental regulation can be designed to best abate pollution at low social cost. Recent research studies the adoption and pricing of renewable energy in developing countries.
Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies. She has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, environment and governance.
Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes including 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (with co-Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer).
Natalia Fabra is Professor of Economics at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. She is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and an Associate Member of the Toulouse School of Economics. She belongs to the Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy (EAGCP) of the European Commission. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2001 at the European University Institute (Florence, under the supervision of Prof. Massimo Motta. Natalia works in the field of Industrial Organization, with an emphasis on Energy and Environmental Economics and Regulation and Competition Policy.
Catherine Wolfram is the William F. Pounds Professor of Energy Economics and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She previously served as the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. Her work has analyzed rural electrification programs in the developing world, energy efficiency programs in the US, the effects of environmental regulation on energy markets and the impact of privatization and restructuring in the US and UK.
Costas Arkolakis is a Professor of Economics at Yale University and an NBER Research Associate. He received his undergraduate degree from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Economics, and his Master and PhD in Economics from the University of Minnesota. He joined the department of Economics at Yale University in 2007, became an Associate Professor in 2013, Henry Kohn Associate Professor in 2014, and a Full Professor in 2018. He is a co-editor of Economic Theory and the Journal of International Economics. His research and teaching specialize in general equilibrium trade theory, spatial economics, macroeconomics and industrial organization.
Valerie Ramey is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy and Research. She is also a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught for 36 years. Ramey is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. She has served as co-editor of the American Economic Review and as a member of several National Science Foundation Advisory Panels and the Federal Economic Statistic Advisory Committee.
Allan Hsiao is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He works on questions in environmental and development economics using tools from empirical industrial organization.
Samuel Kortum is Fellow of the Econometric Society, Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Research Associate at the NBER. Before coming to Yale in 2012, he served on the faculty at Boston University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Chicago. In 2004, he and Jonathan Eaton received the Frisch Medal for their paper “Technology, Geography, and Trade” published in Econometrica. In 2018, they shared the Onassis Prize in International Trade. 
Jessica Seddon is a Senior Fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale. Her work on environmental governance focuses on how new sources of data can be leveraged to enable new (and more sustainable) ways of interacting with the environment around us. Her career in India and the U.S. spans academic, program leadership, and strategic advisory roles focused on institutional design for integrating science into policy and social initiatives. Seddon is a co-founder of The Institutional Architecture Lab (TIAL) and Senior Fellow at Artha Global, a networked policy consulting organization that supports governments in the developing world to design, implement, and institutionalize policy frameworks that promote prosperity, stability, and resilience.
Anthony A. Smith, Jr. (Tony) is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Economics at Yale University. He has served as Chair of the Department of Economics at Yale since 2019. He received a B.S. in Economics from M.I.T. in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Economics from Duke University in 1990. He has also taught at Queen's University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Rochester and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His most recent research takes place at the intersection of macroeconomics and environmental economics, where he is constructing global economy-climate models with high geographic resolution.
Regina R. Rodrigues is an Associate Professor of Physical Oceanography and Climate with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Physical Oceanography from the Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, USA. Her research interests include understanding how tropical ocean basins interact and affect the extra-tropics, leading to extreme events, using observations and modelling. In recognition of her expertise in the dynamics and variability of the tropical and South Atlantic, she co-chairs the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Atlantic Region Panel and Marine Heatwaves Research Focus. She is also a member of the SSG of the international program “Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic”.

Piers Forster is an atmospheric physicist who moved to Leeds in 2005 where he has been professor of climate physics since 2008. He researchers both the causes of climate change and climate feedbacks in the Earth system, to understand temperature and rainfall changes and improve their projections. This is used to inform both climate impacts and mitigation strategies. He has played a significant role authoring Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, including the Fourth (2007) and Fifth (2013) and Sixth (2021) assessment reports and the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C (2018).
Tejal Kanitkar is an Associate Professor in the Energy, Environment, and Climate Change Program, in the School of Natural Sciences and Engineering, at NIAS. She is a mechanical engineer by training, with a Ph.D. in energy science and engineering, and has worked on in the area of energy and climate studies since 2006. Her research interests lie in the areas of energy, development, and climate policy. She works on trying to integrate perspectives from the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences to understand the interconnected aspects of energy production, environmental constraints, and economic development, with a perspective that prioritizes equity in the era of acute environmental crises such as climate change.