Richard Carson

Last updated
Richard Carson
Born (1955-02-24) February 24, 1955 (age 66)
Nationality American
Education Mississippi State University
Alma mater George Washington University
Known forThe most cited environmental economist in the world
Scientific career
FieldsEconomics
Institutions University of California, San Diego
Thesis  (1985)

Richard Taylor Carson (born February 24, 1955, Jackson, Mississippi) is a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego. He obtained a B.A. degree from Mississippi State University in 1977, an M.A. in international affairs from George Washington University in 1979, and an M.A. in statistics and a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. [1] He is the author or editor of eight books and over a hundred journal articles, with over 4000 citations to his works. [2]

Contents

Career

Carson has been a consultant to a number of non-profit organizations, major corporations, and government agencies, including the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Australian Resource Assessment Commission, California Attorney General's Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Electric Power Research Institute, Environment Canada, Interamerican Development Bank, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, National Park Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, OECD, U.K. DEFRA, U.K. MOJ, United Nations, U.S. DOJ, U.S. EPA, and the World Bank. Carson has been a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales, University of Oslo, and the University of Sydney, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Continuing Consultant at Resources for the Future. He served on the National Academy of Science's Committee on Oil Spill Research and Development and as a member of an Academy committee reviewing procedures for water resource planning procedures. He was Program Chair for the Second World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists. [3]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

Environmental economics is a sub-field of economics concerned with environmental issues. It has become a widely studied subject due to growing environmental concerns in the twenty-first century. Environmental economics "undertakes theoretical or empirical studies of the economic effects of national or local environmental policies around the world.... Particular issues include the costs and benefits of alternative environmental policies to deal with air pollution, water quality, toxic substances, solid waste, and global warming."

The value of life is an economic value used to quantify the benefit of avoiding a fatality. It is also referred to as the cost of life, value of preventing a fatality (VPF) and implied cost of averting a fatality (ICAF). In social and political sciences, it is the marginal cost of death prevention in a certain class of circumstances. In many studies the value also includes the quality of life, the expected life time remaining, as well as the earning potential of a given person especially for an after-the-fact payment in a wrongful death claim lawsuit.

Agricultural economics is an applied field of economics concerned with the application of economic theory in optimizing the production and distribution of food and fiber. Agricultural economics began as a branch of economics that specifically dealt with land usage, it focused on maximizing the crop yield while maintaining a good soil ecosystem. Throughout the 20th century the discipline expanded and the current scope of the discipline is much broader. Agricultural economics today includes a variety of applied areas, having considerable overlap with conventional economics. Agricultural economists have made substantial contributions to research in economics, econometrics, development economics, and environmental economics. Agricultural economics influences food policy, agricultural policy, and environmental policy.

Contingent valuation is a survey-based economic technique for the valuation of non-market resources, such as environmental preservation or the impact of contamination. While these resources do give people utility, certain aspects of them do not have a market price as they are not directly sold – for example, people receive benefit from a beautiful view of a mountain, but it would be tough to value using price-based models. Contingent valuation surveys are one technique which is used to measure these aspects. Contingent valuation is often referred to as a ''stated preference'' model, in contrast to a price-based revealed preference model. Both models are utility-based. Typically the survey asks how much money people would be willing to pay to maintain the existence of an environmental feature, such as biodiversity.

Ecosystem valuation is an economic process which assigns a value to an ecosystem and/or its ecosystem services. By quantifying, for example, the human welfare benefits of a forest to reduce flooding and erosion while sequestering carbon, providing habitat for endangered species, and absorbing harmful chemicals, such monetization ideally provides a tool for policy-makers and conservationists to evaluate management impacts and compare a cost-benefit analysis of potential policies. However, such valuations are estimates, and involve the inherent quantitative uncertainty and philosophical debate of evaluating a range non-market costs and benefits.

The embedding effect is an issue in environmental economics and other branches of economics where researchers wish to identify the value of a specific public good using a contingent valuation or willingness-to-pay (WTP) approach. The problem arises because public goods belong to society as a whole, and are generally not traded in the market. Because market prices cannot be used to value them, researchers ask a sample of people how much they are willing to pay for the public good, wildlife preservation for example. The results can be misleading because of the difficulty, for individual society members, of identifying the particular value that they attach to one particular thing which is embedded in a collection of similar things. A similar problem occurs with a wider selection of public goods. The embedding effect suggests the contingent valuation method is not an unbiased approach to measuring policy impacts for cost-benefit analysis of environmental, and other government policies.

David Bruce Audretsch is an American economist. He is a distinguished professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) at Indiana University and also serves as director of the SPEA International Office, Ameritech Chair of Economic Development, and director of SPEA's Institute for Development Strategies (IDS). He is co-founder and co-editor of Small Business Economics: An Entrepreneurship Journal, and also works as a consultant to the United Nations, the World Bank, the OECD, the EU Commission, and the U.S. Department of State. He was the Director of the Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy Group at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Germany from 2003 to 2009. Since 2020, he also serves as a Professor in the Department of Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Klagenfurt.

Choice modelling attempts to model the decision process of an individual or segment via revealed preferences or stated preferences made in a particular context or contexts. Typically, it attempts to use discrete choices in order to infer positions of the items on some relevant latent scale. Indeed many alternative models exist in econometrics, marketing, sociometrics and other fields, including utility maximization, optimization applied to consumer theory, and a plethora of other identification strategies which may be more or less accurate depending on the data, sample, hypothesis and the particular decision being modelled. In addition, choice modelling is regarded as the most suitable method for estimating consumers' willingness to pay for quality improvements in multiple dimensions.

Siegfried von Ciriacy-Wantrup was born in Langenberg, Germany in 1906. After doing his master's work in Illinois, he returned to Bonn to get his Ph.D. in 1931. In 1936, he left Nazi Germany for the United States, arriving at UC Berkeley and the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics in 1938.

Daniel Bromley

Daniel W. Bromley is an economist, the former Anderson-Bascom Professor of applied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and since 2009, Emeritus Professor. His research in institutional economics explains the foundations of property rights, natural resources and the environment; and economic development. He has been editor of the journal Land Economics since 1974.

Kenneth E. Train is an Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. He is also Vice President of NERA Economic Consulting, Inc. in San Francisco, California. He received a Bachelors in Economics at Harvard and PhD from UC Berkeley. He specializes in econometrics and regulation, with applications in energy, environmental studies, telecommunications and transportation.

In public choice theory, preference revelation is an area of study concerned with ascertaining the public's demand for public goods. According to some economists, if government planners do not have "full knowledge of individual preference functions", then it is likely that public goods will be under- or over-supplied. When there is no market to induce people to reveal their subjective valuations, economists say that there is a “problem of preference revelation.” When perfect compensation is possible in principle, it may be impossible in fact because of the problem of preference revelation

Richard B. Norgaard

Richard B. Norgaard is a Professor Emeritus of Ecological Economics in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley, the first chair and a continuing member of the Independent Science Board of CALFED, and a founding member and former president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. He received the Kenneth E. Boulding Memorial Award in 2006 for recognition of advancements in research combining social theory and the natural sciences. He is considered one of the founders of and a continuing leader in the field of ecological economics.

Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh

Jeroen Cornelis Johannes Maria van den Bergh is an environmental economist of Dutch origin. As of January 2015 he was ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Deputy Director for Research of its Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, and professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at VU University Amsterdam.

David Zilberman (economist)

David Zilberman is an Israeli-American economist, professor and Robinson Chair in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Zilberman has been a professor in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at UC Berkeley since 1979. His research has covered a range of fields including the economics of production technology and risk in agriculture, agricultural and environmental policy, marketing and more recently the economics of climate change, biofuel and biotechnology. He won the 2019 Wolf Prize in Agriculture, was the President of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), and is a Fellow of the AAEA and Association of Environmental and Resource Economics. David is an avid blogger on the Berkeley Blog and a life-long Golden State Warriors fan.

W. Michael Hanemann

William Michael Hanemann is an economist who is a major academic contributor to the fields of environmental and resource economics. Hanemann is currently Julie A. Wrigley Professor at the School of Sustainability and Department of Economics of Arizona State University. He has been married to Mary Hanemann for more than four decades.

Shunsuke Managi is the Distinguished Professor of Technology and Policy and the Director of the Urban Institute at Kyushu University, Japan.

Thomas Harry (Tom) Tietenberg is an American economist and environmentalist, and Emeritus Professor at Colby College, known for his work in the field of resource-based economy.

Susana Mourato is a professor of environmental economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She holds a leader position at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. 

Allan Victor Kneese was a pioneer in what came to be called environmental economics. He worked at Resources for the Future from 1961 onwards. He earned a master's degree from the University of Colorado, and a Ph.D. in 1956 from Indiana University.

References

  1. "Richard T. Carson". University of California, San Diego. Retrieved 2012-10-05.
  2. "2009 AERE Fellow: Richard Carson". Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. Archived from the original on 2011-08-31. Retrieved 2012-10-05.
  3. "Biography" (PDF). Retrieved 2 February 2014.