Tinbergen Institute Lectures 2020: Robert S. Pindyck (MIT)

Robert S. Pindyck (the Bank-of-Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance in the Sloan School of Management at MIT) will give the lecturers on The Economics of Climate Change. 

These lectures will provide an introduction to the economic analysis of climate change and climate policy. Professor Pindyck will explain what we know and don’t know about climate change, with an emphasis on the nature of the uncertainty over climate outcomes, and the implications of that uncertainty for policy. The uncertainty is crucial because of the insurance value it creates, and because it interacts with irreversibilities. (Environmental damage can be irreversible, which increases the value of conservation, but a policy itself imposes irreversible costs on society, which works in the opposite direction.) We will see that policy is largely driven by the possibility of an extreme outcome – a “climate catastrophe.” And that will lead us to the economic analysis of catastrophes more generally: How should society respond to the variety of potential global catastrophes we face?