RICHARD T. CARSON is a Distinguished Professor in and former Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. Carson served as President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE). He is an elected Fellow of AERE and of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. Carson previously served as Research Director for International Environmental Policy at the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and as a Senior Fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Carson received a Ph.D. in resource economics and M.A. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1985 and an M.A. in international relations from George Washington University in 1979. Carson has extensive experience in assessing the benefits and costs of environmental policies. His specialty is valuing non-marketed goods
and new commercial products using a wide array of techniques. He has estimated the benefits of the U.S. Clean Water Act, removing low-level carcinogens from drinking water, protecting groundwater aquifers, economic impacts associated with fisheries management practices and health and visibility improvements due to air quality changes. In other studies, he has examined the benefits of visibility improvements in the Grand Canyon, preventing residential water shortages in California cities, restoring Everglades National Park, and the addition of the Kakadu Conservation Zone to Kakadu National Park in Australia. He served as principal investigator on the economic damage assessments for the Exxon Valdez oil spill for the State of Alaska, and large scale DDT and PCB contamination off the Los Angeles coast for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He is a frequent commentator on natural disasters. Carson won the 2000 Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Cup for Web Analytics and was Chief Scientist for the start-up firm Memetrics, which is now part of Accenture Marketing Sciences. Carson’s recent work on forecasting Chinese carbon dioxide emissions received international attention. His econometric research has focused on experimental and sampling designs, computer intensive and robust statistical techniques, discrete choice models and forecasting. Carson has designed surveys for data collection in many areas.
Professor Carson has been a consultant to a number of non-profit organizations, major corporations, and government agencies, including the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Australian Resource Assessment Commission, California Attorney General’s Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Electric Power Research Institute, Environment Canada, Interamerican Development Bank, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, National Park Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, OECD, U.K. DEFRA, U.K. MOJ, United Nations, U.S. DOJ, U.S. EPA, and the World Bank. Carson has been a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales, University of Oslo, and the University of Sydney, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Continuing Consultant at Resources for the Future. He served on the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Oil Spill Research and Development and as a member of an Academy committee reviewing procedures for water resource planning procedures. He was Program Chair for the Second World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists. Carson’s publications appear in the American Economic Review, American Political Science Review, Ecological Economics, Energy Policy, Environment and Development Economics, Environmental and Resource Economics, International Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Journal of Environmental Management, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, Journal of Urban Economics, Land Economics, Marine Resource Economics, Marketing Letters, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Public Opinion Quarterly, Review of Economics and Statistics, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Risk Analysis, Water Resources Research, and other professional journals. He is the author or editor of eight books. With Robert Mitchell he wrote Using Surveys to Value Public Goods: The Contingent Valuation Method, which won the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists’ Publication of Enduring Quality Award.
