EGC research on emissions markets wins UC Berkeley Haas Sustainable Business Research Prize
Rohini Pande and Nicholas Ryan, with coauthors, were awarded the prize for “research that offers promising, real-world solutions for advancing sustainable business.”
Research co-authored by EGC Director Rohini Pande, and affiliate Nicholas Ryan has won an award for sustainable business from UC Berkeley Haas Center for Responsible Business. The research, co-authored with the University of Chicago’s Michael Greenstone and Anant Sudarshan of the University of Warwick, was conducted in Surat, in the Indian state of Gujarat, where manufacturing contributes heavily to particulate matter pollution.
Collaborating with regulators, they piloted the world’s first cap-and-trade market specifically for particulate pollution, requiring industrial plants to install pollution monitors and trade emissions permits. The pilot led to emission reductions by 20% to 30% and shows that emissions reductions and regulation enforcement can be cost-effective, reducing abatement costs by 11% for participating plants. The success of this pilot market has led similar programs to expand across India, demonstrating the global potential of market-based pollution controls.
The research was selected from more than 100 paper nominations from around the world by two committees—an academic panel which judged academic rigor, and a practitioner committee focused on real-world relevance.
“This paper stands out for its combination of rigorous experimental design and engagement in real-world policy implementation. It provides rare experimental evidence that emissions markets can reduce pollution while lowering costs, even in contexts where such approaches are often assumed to be infeasible.” - Professor Jonathan Weigel, Academic Selection Committee member
Of the $20,000 in prize money, $10,000 went to the winners. The committees also awarded Yale’s Ryan $7,000 for the first runner-up paper “Holding Up Green Energy: Counterparty Risk in the Indian Solar Power Market,” and $3,000 to Matthew Caulfield of Fordham University and Andrew Lynn of Villanova University for their second runner-up paper “Federated Corporate Social Responsibility: Constraining the Responsible Corporation.”