When Martin Weitzman, Research Professor of Economics at Harvard University, passed away in 2019, his friends and colleagues mourned the loss of a truly influential figure in the field of economics. His impressive portfolio of theoretical and empirical research on everything from unemployment to inflation to climate change was extraordinarily substantive and impactful.
In a new article published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, HEEP Director Robert Stavins, the A. J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development at the
Harvard Kennedy School, and Gernot Wagner (Harvard PhD 2007), senior lecturer at Columbia Business School, analyze the scope and depth of Weitzman’s contributions to environmental economics, and the lasting imprint that he has left on the field.
“If economic theory is about stripping a problem down to its absolute essentials and deriving meaningful insights from those essentials, then Weitzman was a master,” Stavins and Wagner write. “Over and over again, he demonstrated how careful and rigorous analysis of artfully constructed theoretical models can provide valuable and often surprising insights into difficult economic problems with real implications for the design of public policies.”
Read the full article here.