Teaching

ECON/FRE 374 Land and Resource Economics

This course introduces the fundamental concepts of environmental and resource economics and applies them to the conservation and management of non-renewable and renewable resources. The goal of this course is for students to learn how to evaluate environmental changes and resource management based on an analytical framework from simple economic principles. The course introduces valuation techniques, static and dynamic efficiency and environmental policies and applies these concepts to the conservation and the use of minerals, fossil fuels (including their impact on climate change), global fish stocks, forests and biodiversity conservation.

The syllabus is here.

 

FRE 474 Economics of Global Resource Use and Conservation

This course is an empirical course about the causal impact of economic development and environmental policies on environmental outcomes. The goal of this course is for students to learn how to apply these techniques in the context of environmental economics and resource conservation using R. In a first section, the course introduces econometric techniques such as instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs and differences in differences. In a section section, students learn how to implement these econometric techniques as well as basic data wrangling in the programming language R and how to write reports in Markdown. In a last section, the students replicate the results of published studies in environmental and resource economics. Instead of a final exam, students summarize the replication exercise in a short report.

The syllabus is here.

 

FRE 603 Advanced Food and Resource Economics

To do so, I will first introduce the fundamental mathematical tools for resource economics and dynamic systems. We then discuss how these tools are used to derive the most important results in resource economics. Finally, we will apply these tools to current environmental and resource problems to formulate policies that ensure optimal use from a societal perspective.

 

FRE500/600 Environmental Economics Seminar 

This is an environmental economics seminar in which faculty members and graduate students across campus (mainly Land and Food Systems, Vancouver School of Economics and Sauder School of Business) present their work in progress. The main goal of this seminar is to communicate research within UBC’s environmental economics community and to get early feedback for ongoing research.