tailieunhanh - UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ENVIRONMENTAL AND RESOURCE ECONOMICS

Several years ago I gave a seminar about some of my research. I started out with a very simple example. One of the faculty in the audience interrupted me to say that he had worked on something like this several years ago, but his model was \much more complex". I replied \My model was complex when I started, too, but I just kept working on it till it got simple!" And that's what you should do: keep at it till it gets simple. The whole point of a model is to give a simplied representation of reality. Einstein once said \Everything should be as simple as possible. | UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ENVIRONMENTAL AND RESOURCE ECONOMICS Economic Principles and the Environment Professor Stephen Smith Course outline and reading list 2007 2008 Course lecturer Stephen Smith. Office hour Mondays - pm. Room Drayton House. email Lecture and tutorial class times 9 two-hour weekly lectures on Mondays 10-12 starting 8 October. 4 tutorial classes to discuss problems and written work 4pm Mondays 6 11 13 11 27 11 11 12 Aims To provide students with a thorough understanding of core economic theory concerning environmental problems and policies as a foundation for subsequent study of environmental problems and policies within the degree programme and as one of the key elements in the professional training of an environmental economist. Objectives At the end of the course students should have a good appreciation of the economic theory of externalities in the form of pollution and environmental hazards the market failures that can arise from externalities in an unregulated market economy and the scope and limits of individual Coasean bargaining to resolve externalities without regulatory intervention have a good understanding of the economic theory relating to the choice of instruments for pollution control including the relative merits of policies based on command-and-control and market mechanisms have the ability to read and interpret economic models of externalities and environmental regulation expressed in standard mathematical notation and have had some experience of reading and interpreting original journal articles on this subject. Syllabus This course sets out the economic theory relating to pollution and other externalities. It covers the definition of externalities economic welfare in the presence of externalities the Coase theorem public goods problems of preference revelation the choice of instruments for environmental protection including the relative merits of regulatory .