Working with Economic Data: Valuing the Environment

5/2:  Added link to Moodle for the Final Memorandum

ECON 136:  Working with Economic Data:  Valuing the Environment

I change my office hours each week (I try to post Friday afternoon), if none of those hours work for you, please email with all the times that might work for you.

Economists treat nature as providing environmental services that contribute to the production of goods and services that address human needs and desires.  So, this course will focus in part on the measurement and valuation of those services as part of quantifying market outcomes.  Within the discipline, environmental harm is seen as a failure of the market. We will consider how economists measure the magnitude of this deviation from the ideal, and assess efforts to ameliorate the failure.

This course serves two overlapping communities:   Those of us participating in the Eco-Literacy 360 and those looking for a stand-alone course that builds mastery of quantitative skills and economic principles as applied to understanding human interactions with the environment.

Exam week -- Final Memorandum -- see block 1 in Moodle

Week 14 Tasks

Week 13 Tasks

Week 12 Tasks

Week 11 Tasks

Week 10 Tasks

Week 9 Tasks

Week 8 Tasks

Week 7 Tasks

Week 6 Tasks

Week 5 Tasks

Week 4 Tasks

Week 3 Tasks

Week 2 Tasks

Week 1 Tasks

See a fuller course description, a discussion of course goals and assessment and the course outline as of February 10 attached below.   For most class meetings, I'll be asking you to grapple with some analytical tools economists use.   To give you a first shot of practicing using those tools and assess your mastery of them before we meet, I'll be using our Course site at Sapling Learning.   Bundled with that course site is e-access to Tim Taylor's introductory economics text Principles of Economics:  Economics and the Economy, 2nd ed.