Using Economy-Wide Modeling of Climate Change Policies

In my podcast series, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,”  I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with a number of former Harvard PhD students who have gone on to wonderful careers; and my most recent podcast was no exception, because I was joined by Karen Fisher-Vanden, Distinguished Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics and Public Policy at Pennsylvania State University, and President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.  You can listen to our complete conversation here.

Fisher-Vanden earned a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Economics at the University of California, Davis, a M.S. in Management Science at UCLA Anderson School of Management, and a Ph.D. in Public Policy at Harvard. She spent time working at the South Coast Air Quality Management District in Los Angeles, California and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington D.C. before settling into her academic career, initially at Dartmouth College and now at Penn State.

When I ask Karen why she moved to Penn State (having previously received tenure at Dartmouth), she responds, “Penn State is known for its work on climate.  I was really excited about the opportunity to come here and build a large research program in integrated assessment modeling and economy-wide modeling for climate, not only climate policy, but climate impacts and adaptation, and I was able to do that here.”

Much of her research has involved economy-wide models designed to decipher the economic feedbacks that drive climate impacts and climate policy, including a 2018 paper she co-authored with Qin Fan and Allen Klaiber, published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental Research Economists.

“What I really like about this paper is it shows how econometrics and structural econometrics can be combined with economy-wide modeling to capture some important general equilibrium feedbacks that are crucial for getting the story [right]… There had been [several] papers that were using these residential sorting models, which is a structural econometric model, to analyze the effects of climate change on household location choice. And they basically were finding that climate change would create this large shift in population from southern states in the U.S. to the northern states,” she explains.  “However, if you take into account equilibrium effects, you know that if everybody moves, north wages fall, housing prices increase. And these models were not taking that into account.”

‘[We] found that even though you do get some movement north, it significantly is dampened. And that seems to make sense if you start to look at what’s happening in areas that you see these people moving to high climate risk states like Arizona, Texas, Florida, because the cost of living is a lot cheaper. We’re starting to already see that type of thing [happening].”

Karen has regularly served on National Academies panels, EPA review panels, the EPA Science Advisory Board, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  I ask her whether those stints have been a diversion – albeit perhaps a worthwhile diversion – from her research and teaching, or has such service actually contributed to her research and/or teaching?

She responds that serving as a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group III, in 2014, assessing literature on the scientific, technological, environmental, economic, and social aspects of mitigation of climate change since 2007, helped guide her current work as director of Penn State’s Program on Coupled Human and Earth Systems.

“Just to know how the IPCC works…has been very valuable not only in teaching… A lot of times being involved in these things allows you to identify new areas of research, and that’s helped me with some recent direction of my research program,” she remarks. She notes that her students glean a deeper understanding of how to develop public policies that will have a positive impact.

“Why you’re taking my course is you have to understand the economic incentives to change behavior, and you need some sort of training in economics to be able to do this. You need to be able to talk like an economist in terms of talking to policymakers,” she states. “You want to harness [their passion], but you want to give them the tools to be able to be more effective in trying to argue their case and make a difference.”

For this and much more, please listen to my podcast conversation with Karen Fisher-Vanden, the 63rd episode over the past five years of the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month.  You can find a transcript of our conversation at the website of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.  Previous episodes have featured conversations with:

“Environmental Insights” is hosted on SoundCloud, and is also available on iTunesPocket CastsSpotify, and Stitcher.

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Author: Robert Stavins

Robert N. Stavins is the A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy & Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, Director of Graduate Studies for the Doctoral Program in Public Policy and the Doctoral Program in Political Economy and Government, Co-Chair of the Harvard Business School-Kennedy School Joint Degree Programs, and Director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.