Michael Greenstone

Biosketch

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. In addition, he serves as the Director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the Founding Director of the University’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth. During the Obama Administration, he served as the Chief Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he co-led the development of the United States Government’s social cost of carbon. Additionally, he co-founded the Climate Impact Lab that is producing local and global estimates of the damages from climate change and the Air Quality Life Index that provides hyperlocal information on the effects of air pollution on life expectancy globally. Previously, he was the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT, an editor of the Journal of Political Economy and The Review of Economics and Statistics, and directed the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics and The Hamilton Project.
He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and a Carnegie Fellow (aka the “Brainy Award”).
Greenstone received a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in 1998 and a B.A. in Economics with High Honors from Swarthmore College in 1991.

Research Interests

Greenstone’s research is focused on the global energy challenge that requires all societies to balance the needs for inexpensive and reliable energy, clean air, and minimizing the damages from climate change. His research has influenced policy in the United States and globally, including by serving as a basis for the United States Government’ estimate of the damages from climate change, producing evidence that helped to prompt China’s “War on Pollution”, and designing, testing, and scaling up of cap-and-trade or pollution markets in India and of machine learning techniques to target U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state environmental inspections.