School of Economics Chair Laura Taylor, Ph.D. student Christopher Blackburn along with Adjunct Associate Professor Dr. Juan Moreno-Cruz represented Georgia Tech at the 6th World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists (WCERE) in Gothenburg, Sweden this summer.

Dr. Taylor is currently the President the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE), the organization that co-hosted the World Congress.  The World Congress is held once every four years, and this year’s was the largest ever, attracting well over 1,200 environmental economists from around the globe. 

In addition to participating in the opening ceremonies, presenting awards, and introducing plenary speaker Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama, Dr. Taylor presented a seminar on "work-life balance" for young female economists working at the intersection of environmental and development economics. 

“I couldn’t be more pleased to see Georgia Tech represented so well at the world’s largest gathering of environmental, natural resource, and energy economists.  And I was particularly pleased that our graduate student could present his research and be exposed to the best researchers in our field globally” said Dr. Taylor.

Mr. Blackburn, who expects to complete his Ph.D. in Economics in May 2019, presented his paper titled "Do pilot and demonstration projects work?"  The paper is co-authored with his doctoral advisor Dr. Juan Moreno-Cruz (Georgia Tech/University of Waterloo), Dr. Daniel Matisoff (Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy), and Dr. Mallory Flowers (currently a post-doc in the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University). Christopher’s research examines whether demonstration projects can lead to faster adoption of new technologies in a region.  Blackburn and his coauthors explore this question in the context of “green building” technology and they find that green building adoption rates increase by 12% in markets with a pilot and demonstration project relative to markets without them.  Importantly, they also find that green building demonstration projects induce learning externalities, driving down the costs of adoption for future builders.

Dr. Moreno-Cruz also presented his own research  "An Economic Anatomy of Optimal Climate Policy", organized or chaired three additional sessions presenting research in energy and climate change.