This initiative has concluded its research.
As the eleventh Weatherhead Initiative grantees a team of researchers led by principal investigators Professors Michael B. McElroy of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Dale W. Jorgenson of the Department of Economics, and including Harvard-based researchers Chris P. Nielsen, Mun S. Ho, and Zhao Yu; Tsinghua University-based Cao Jing and Wang Yuxuan; and Lei Yu of the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning developed a uniquely comprehensive research framework for evaluating the costs and benefits of national strategies to control emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants in China. Formally entitled “The Costs and Benefits of Carbon and Air Pollution Control in China: An Interdisciplinary and Analytical Framework,” the project’s purpose has been to investigate the effects of two kinds of emission control policies: carbon taxes, and anticipated technology mandates for control of nitrogen oxides. Policy options have been investigated using an integrated framework developed from multiple streams of scholarship published by the participants over more than a decade of prior investigation. At the project’s end, components of the research will be disseminated through refereed disciplinary and cross-disciplinary journals. The entire integrated analysis will be published in a reviewed, edited volume from an academic press modeled on the team’s well-reviewed previous book Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China, edited by Mun S. Ho and Chris P. Nielsen (MIT Press, 2007), ideally in Chinese as well as English.
Principal Investigators
Michael B. McElroy
Faculty Associate. Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Dale W. Jorgenson
Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University, Department of Economics.