Economic Modeling of Environmental Policies

Biography
Robert Beach, PhD, specializes in the development and application of economic models to analyze agricultural, environmental, and natural resource regulations, programs, and policies. Research applications include studies evaluating the economic impacts of climate change on agriculture and forests, the potential for and economic impacts of agricultural mitigation of greenhouse gases for regions around the world, potential mitigation of black carbon and organic carbon emissions, farm household response to livestock disease prevention and control policies, risk management and crop insurance, policies to mitigate the impacts of natural disasters, and factors influencing forest investment and management. He has published his research in journals including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Economics, the American Journal of Public Health, Forest Policy and Economics, The Energy Journal, and Land Economics. Dr. Beach is also an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University. Read More…

Biography
Michael Gallaher, PhD, is the director of RTI’s Technology, Energy, and the Environment Program and has over 10 years of experience leading projects for NIST, EPA, NSF, and NTIA and other federal agencies modeling the economic impact of new technologies. Dr. Gallaher specializes in developing baseline/counterfactual scenarios from which incremental costs and benefits can be measured, and he has conducted both retrospective and prospective technology assessments. His research has involved assessing the economic implications of technology adoption in the automotive, aerospace, computer hardware and software, chemical, iron and steel, and construction industries. Dr. Gallaher has led the review and redesign of national establishment-level surveys for NSF and EPA and has developed and implemented a wide range of survey methods, including in-person, telephone, mail, and Internet-based surveys. Read More…

Biography
George Van Houtven, PhD, specializes in the measurement of environmental, health, and natural resource values and the application of these measures to evaluate environmental and risk management policies. He has extensive experience in conducting original nonmarket valuation research, including the application of contingent valuation, conjoint analysis, averting behavior, and cost-of-illness methods. He also specializes in meta-regression analysis and other benefit transfer methods that synthesize results from existing research to support policy analysis. He has coordinated several interdisciplinary studies that link environmental and economic models and that apply benefit transfer approaches to support cost-benefit analyses of environmental regulations. He has also conducted research to examine the effectiveness of unit-based pricing policies for solid waste management, and he has analyzed the role of cost-benefit factors in environmental regulatory decision-making. His research has been published in several journals including the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Land Economics, and Environmental and Natural Resource Economics. Read More…