2017 Summer Conference Awards
AERE is pleased to announce the following Awards given during the 2017 AERE Summer Conference AERE Fellows Publication of Enduring Quality Outstanding Publication in the We invite you to read more about the awardees below! AERE FELLOWS
Among other numerous awards and honors, Professor Dasgupta was named a Fellow of the Econometric Society (1975), a co-winner with Karl-Goran Maler of the 2002 Volvo Environment Prize, winner of the 2004 Kenneth E. Boulding Memorial Award of the International Society for Ecological Economics, and was the 2007 recipient of the John Kenneth Galbraith Award by the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. Professor Dasgupta has also been President of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (2010-11) and was named Knight Bachelor by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in her Birthday Honours List in for "services to economics" (2002). Within the area of environmental and natural resource economics, Professor Dasgupta's influential publications include Guidelines for Project Evaluation (with S.A. Marglin and A.K. Sen; United Nations, 1972), Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources (with G.M. Heal; Cambridge University Press, 1979 (recipient of the AERE "Publication of Enduring Quality Award in 2003); The Control of Resources (Harvard University Press, 1982); and Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment (Oxford University Press, 2001; revised edition, 2004).
Dr. McGartland has dedicated his career to the advancement of economic science and its role in environmental policy-making. The National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE) that Dr. McGartland directs has a staff of PhD economists who conduct state of the art research to support the use of economic science in federal decision making. PUBLICATION OF ENDURING QUALITYThe Publication of Enduring Quality (PEQ) award recognizes works that are of seminal nature and with enduring value in environmental and resource economics. The PEQ selection committee was chaired by Brian Copeland, University of British Columbia, and included Olivier Deschenes, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Frances Homans, University of Minnesota. This year, AERE recognizes two influential empirical papers on induced innovation in environmental economics.
Environmental outcomes are influenced by the cumulative effects of technical change. Through price incentives, market-based environmental policies may be able to shift the path of innovation towards cleaner technologies, making the attainment of environmental goals more feasible. The idea that the direction of innovation is influenced by relative prices goes back to Hicks and his theory of induced innovation. A key empirical question is whether there is evidence of this effect in contexts relevant to environmental problems and, if so, the magnitude of the effect. The two papers we honor with the 2017 PEQ award study the effects of energy prices on energy efficiency. One looks at the energy efficiency of final products; the other looks at patents. Outstanding Publication in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource EconomistsEach year, AERE selects an outstanding research paper published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists during the previous calendar year.
This research asks the question: can traditional regulation of the environment be improved or replaced by public release of information about polluting facilities? The 2016 JAERE paper by Mary Evans makes two major contributions in this literature. First, it is a model of academic innovation in identification. It uses an accidental public release of facilities’ identities on an EPA Clean Air Act “watch list” to identify the impacts of both traditional and informational policies in what is essentially a national quasi-experiment. Second, it measures the complementarity of government oversight and civil action: government oversight is effective but can be substantially more effective when information regarding that oversight enters the public realm. The paper includes an extensive series of robustness checks that rule out potential confounding factors, and it provides a benchmark of best practice in quasi-experimental evaluation. For regulators, her paper provides potential new management tools that are easy to implement and likely to make real world impacts. For researchers, her paper provides a robust, well executed, and highly policy relevant blueprint for examining non-traditional forms of regulatory impacts. |
Sir Partha Dasgupta 
Dr. Al McGartland is Director of the National Center for Environmental Economics at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Prior to his current role at the US EPA, Dr. McGartland was Vice President of Abt Associates (1990-1991) and a Senior Economist at the US Office of Management and Budget, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (1988-1990).
