Instructors: Piero Basaglia; Prof. Dr. Moritz Alexander Drupp
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
6,0
Language of instruction:
English
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 18
Registration group: Profilbildungsseminar
Comments/contents:
Note: Due to COVID-19, the seminar is re-structured. Please check you STINE-messages for details. The course will commence on April 22, 3pm on zoom. The invitation will be sent via STINE-message. Also note: On 13.05. we will start at 16:00 and offer more bilateral feedback options instead.
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Dear students,
many thanks for your interest in our seminar.
First of all, we hope that you all and your relatives and friends are well.
As you will probably have heard by now, we will not be able to hold physical in-class meetings in the summer term for the foreseeable future.
While this considerably impacts how we had planned our seminar, we think it would be too unfortunate if we just cancelled it. So we’ll have to make the best out of it and move online as far as possible. We will likely use the platform zoom (https://zoom.us), for which the university has acquired a license. If there is anyone among you who has data security concerns, let us know. While we usually have break-out one-on-one discussions, this is not as easy in zoom, so we have to use some workarounds.
The semester now officially starts 20.04. and no class is allowed to start before this. So we have to re-schedule our first meeting. Instead of this Wednesday (08.04. from 15:00-18:30), we will do this 22.04. from 15:00-18:30. Following that meeting, we’ll do the assignment of topics via e-mail – you find details in the slides that we’ll upload.
In the interest of having a smooth conference call and a good start into the seminar despite the general chaos, please prepare as follows (and in that order):
(1) Download the zoom software and familiarize yourself with it. There are ample “how-to” videos around.
(2) Prepare a one-sentence statement on: “What do you want to learn in this course?”
(3) If the last number of your student ID – Matrikelnummer – is even, think of an example how economic distribution/inequality affects environmental policy; If it is uneven, think of an example how environmental policy affects economic distribution/inequality. Please write this down, again in one sentence.
(4) Read the suggested literature that we have already uploaded to STINE.
(5) Think about what might be the most interesting and relevant research question on inequality and the environment from your perspective? If you like, you can already start thinking about how one might go about in answering it.
Please check your STINE-E-Mail regularly for further updates as we move closer to our first virtual meeting.
See you soon,
Piero Basaglia and Moritz Drupp
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Prof. Dr. Moritz Drupp
Working Group on Environmental Economics
Department of Economics
University of Hamburg
E-Mails:
Piero.Basaglia@uni-hamburg.de
Moritz.Drupp@uni-hamburg.de
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At the onset of the 21st century, (environmental) economics faces two mega-challenges: On the one hand, the loss of environmental goods and services is widespread and accelerating, while, on the other hand, concerns about economic inequalities become more prevalent in science, policy and society. These two challenges are inter-related: Economic inequality may influence environmental valuation and policy, while environmental policy may affect economic inequality in turn. The two challenges should therefore be studied and treated at the same time. The seminar addresses this interrelation by addressing a number of key issues. For example:
(1) How does distribution of income within a society affect the economic valuation of the environment and nature?
(2) What are individual and societal preferences for a more equal distribution of income and environmental quality?
(3) Who benefits from better environmental quality?
(4) Who bears the costs of environmental policy?
(5) How can environmental policies be designed to take distributional effects into account?
Didactic concept:
- ?1. session (08.04.2020): Introduction to the seminar, presentation of topics; assignment of topics; hints on writing term papers.
- In-between: Individual work on the topics and creation of an exposé (2-4 pages)
- 2. meeting (13.05.2020): Peer-to-peer feedback on the exposés; Further details on the preparation of the term paper, seminar presentation and discussion of another paper
- In-between: Individual work on the term papers, feedback in office hours
- 03.06.2020 (23:59 o’clock): Submission of the term paper (as PDF and Word.docx via e-mail)
- In-between: Creation of the presentation and the discussion of another seminar paper, which will be sent to you by the lecturer on 05.06.2020.
- Block-session (12-13.6.2020): Presentations and discussions
Literature:
- Bento, A.M. (2013). Equity impacts of environmental policy. Annual Review of Resource Economics 5(1), 181-196.
- Drupp, M.A., Meya, J.N., Baumgärtner, S. & Quaas, M.F. (2018). Economic Inequality and the Value of Nature. Ecological Economics, 150, 340-345.
- Fullerton, D. (2011). Six distributional effects of environmental policy. Risk Analysis, 31(6): 923-929.
- Piketty, T., & Saez, E. (2014). Inequality in the long run. Science, 344(6186), 838-843.
Additional examination information:
Your term paper as well as the combination of presentation and discussion (Ko-Referat) count equally towards your overall grade.
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