Sou-Cheng (Terrya) Choi

Research Scientist

Computation Institute

University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

• Algorithms for large singular linear systems
• Applied and computational mathematics
• Industrial-grade software engineering

Choi currently focuses on computational issues and software design for solving scientific problems related to climate change and economic policies. She works on OSCEF, an open-source software framework and toolbox whose core is for formulating and solving large-scale computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, which are widely used in computational economics and climate policy analyses.  

In 2012, Choi was awarded the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra (SIAG/LA) Prize for the paper based on her doctoral dissertation, "MINRES-QLP: A Krylov Subspace Method for Indefinite or Singular Symmetric Systems," SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 33:1810-1836, 2011. The prize is awarded every three years by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and is considered one of the most prestigious prizes of its kind in the field. In 2007, Choi received Special Congressional Recognition from the U.S. House of Representatives for outstanding public service.

Choi received her PhD in Computational and Mathematical Engineering from the Stanford University. She was a Senior Member of Technical Staff with Oracle before joining the University of Chicago with a joint appointment in the Argonne National Laboratory.  Choi is a member of the SIAM, the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), and the Hong Kong Mathematical Society (HKMS).

Don Fullerton

Gutgsell Professor, Department of Finance and Institute of Government and Public Affairs

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Areas of Expertise:

• Environmental and energy economics and policy analysis
• Public economics and taxation
• Distributional effects of taxes, social security, and regulations

Fullerton’s early research in public economics focused on computable general equilibrium models of taxation, marginal effective tax rates, the marginal cost of public funds, and distributional effects of taxes on a lifetime basis. His more recent research includes the distributional effects of social security. In environmental and energy economics, Fullerton works on household disposal of garbage and recycling, policies for green design, vehicle emission control policies, carbon taxes, and other policies in the energy sector where direct environmental taxes are not feasible.

Don Fullerton received a BA from Cornell in 1974 and a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley in 1978. He taught at Princeton University (1978-84), the University of Virginia (1984-91), Carnegie Mellon University (1991-94) and the University of Texas (1994-2008), before joining the University of Illinois in 2008. From 1985 to 1987, he served in the U.S. Treasury Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis.

Link: 

Don Fullerton's web site

Kenneth L. Judd

 Areas of Expertise:

• Economics of taxation
• Imperfect competition
• Mathematical economics

Judd's current research focuses on developing computational methods for economic modeling and applying them to tax policy, antitrust issues, macroeconomics, and policies related to climate change. He is currently the director of the Initiative for Computational Economics at the University of Chicago, and a member of the Natioanl Academies Board on Mathematical Sciences and Applications.

He was coeditor of the RAND Journal of Economics (1988–95) and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (2002–2006), and associate editor of the Journal of Public Economics (1988–97). Judd is a fellow of the Econometric Society and served as a member of the Economics Panel of the National Science Foundation (1986–88).

Link: Ken Judd's web site

Samuel S. Kortum

Professor of Economics

Yale University

Areas of Expertise:

• International economics
• Industrial organization
• Mathematical economics

Kortum is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University and PhD in Economics from Yale.

Kortum was formerly on the faculty of Boston University and the University of Minnesota, a Staff Economist at the Federal Reserve Board, and a National Fellow at the NBER. In 2004, he and Jonathan Eaton received the Frisch Medal for their paper "Technology, Geography, and Trade." He is currently an editor of the Journal of Political Economy. In addition to international economics, Kortum has written on economic growth, innovation, technology diffusion, and firm dynamics. His research has appeared in top academic journals and has been supported by a series of grants from the National Science Foundation.

Link: Samuel S. Kortum's web site

Peggy Loudermilk

Research Scientist, Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Thomas S. Lontzek

Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Business Administration, University of Zurich 

Nirupama Rao

Assistant Professor, Wagner School of Public Service, New York University 

Areas of Expertise:

• Tax Policy
• U.S. Oil Supply

Rao's research examines the impact of taxation on production and investment decisions. Her main dissertation chapter focused on how excise taxes on oil production affect the extraction decisions of domestic producers. She has also studied how effectively federal tax credits increase research and development spending. Rao's other work investigates the composition and importance of corporate deferred taxes and the incentives they create to retime income around changes in tax policy. She completed her Ph.D in economics at MIT in June 2010 where she previously earned her undergraduate degree.

Link: 

Nirupama Rao's web site

Evan Anderson

Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Northern Illinois University

Areas of Expertise:

• Financial Economics
• Macroeconomics
• Computational Economics

Professor Anderson received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1998. Prior to joining Northern Illinois University, he held a position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His recent research has focused on risk sharing when agents have risk-sensitive preferences, and on the implications of heterogeneous beliefs for asset pricing.

Research Projects

Robustness in Economic Models with Climate Change

William Brock

Vilas Research Professor, Emeritus of Economics, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Research Professor, University of Missouri, Columbia

Areas of Expertise:

• Complex dynamics in economics
• Mathematical economics

Brock is the Vilas Research Professor of Economics, Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he has taught economics since 1975. Brock received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is well known for his contributions to the theory of optimal growth, the breadth of applications of the intertemporal model to economics, and other aspects of nonlinear dynamics.

Brock has been a Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1992, a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1998,  and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association since 2004.

Research Projects

Robustness in Economic Models with Climate Change |  Heat Balance Climate Models

Recent Publications

William Brock, Lars Peter Hansen Wrestling with Uncertainty in Climate Economic Models, October 9, 2017, SSRN. (lecture on this paper here)

Brock, W. and A. Xepapadeas. 2017. Climate Change Policy Under Polar Amplification.  European Economic Review 94:263-282.

Cai, Y., W. Brock, and A. Xepapadeas. 2016. Climate Change Economics and Heat

Transport Across the Globe: Spatial-DSICE. In 2017 Allied Social Science Association

(ASSA) Annual Meeting, January 6-8, 2017, Chicago, Illinois, 251833. Agricultural and

Applied Economics Association

Anderson, E. W., W. A. Brock, and A. Sanstad. 2016. Robust Consumption and Energy

Decisions. Working paper, SSRN.

Evan Anderson et al. "Robust analytical and computational explorations of coupled economic-climate models with carbon-climate response." RDCEP Working Paper No. 14-05, January 2014.

W A Brock et al. “Energy balance climate models, damage reservoirs, and the time profile of climate change policy.” Oxford Handbook of the Macroecon. of Global Warming, Ox U Press 2014. Ch 3 p 1952

*Brock, William, Gustav Engstrom, and Anastasios Xepapadeas. "Spatial climate-economic models in the design of optimal climate policies across locations." European Economic Review 69 (2014): 78-103.

Carpenter, S., Brock, W., Folke, C., Van Ness, E., Scheffer, M., 2015,

 “Allowing variance may enlarge the safe operating space for exploited

ecosystems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 112(46):14384-14389

William Brock and Steven Durlauf. 2015, On sturdy policy evaluation,.  Journal of Law and Economics, 44,S2.

*William A. Brock et al. "Energy balance climate models and general equilibrium optimal mitigation policies." Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 37, no. 12 (2013): 2371-2396.

William A Brock et al. Optimal control in space and time and the management of environmental resources. Annu. Rev. Resour. Econ., 6(1):33–68, 2014.

William A Brock, Anastasios Xepapadeas, and Athanasios N Yannacopoulos. Spatial externalities and agglomeration in a competitive industry. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 42:143–174, 2014.

William A Brock, Anastasios Xepapadeas, and Athanasios N Yannacopoulos. Optimal agglomerations in dynamic economics. Journal of Mathematical Economics, 53:1–15, 2014

William Brock, Anastasios Xepapadeas, et al. Modeling coupled climate, ecosystems, and economic systems.Technical report, Athens University of Economics and Business, 2015. Revised, 2017,

forthcoming in Handbook of Environmental Economics, Partha Dasgupta et al., eds., Elsevier: North Holland.

Brock, William A., Anastasios Xepapadeas, and A. N. Yannacopoulos. "Robust control and hot spots in spatiotemporal economic systems." Dynamic Games and Applications, (2014): 1-33.

W A Brock et al. “Robust control of a spatially distributed commercial fishery.” Dynamic Optimization in Environmental Economics, E. Moser et al, editors, Springer, 2014. Pgs 215–241.

William A. Brock et al. "Spatial externalities and agglomeration in a competitive industry." Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 42 (2014): 143-174.

Stephen R Carpenter, William A Brock, Jonathan J Cole, and Michael L Pace. A new approach for rapid detection of nearby thresholds in ecosystem time series. Oikos, 123(3):290–297, 2014.

James J Elser, Timothy J Elser, Stephen R Carpenter, and William A Brock. Regime shift in fertilizer commodities indicates more turbulence ahead for food security. PloS one, 9(5):e93998, 2014

S. Kefi et al. Early warning signals of ecological transitions: methods for spatial patterns. PloS one, 2014.

Won Chang

Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Cincinnati

Won Chang is currently a professor at the University of Cincinnati. Before this new appointment, Won was a postdoctoral scholar in Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on statistical methods for simulating important aspects of future climate such as storm patterns and sea level changes. The statistical challenges of this work involve performing conditional simulation and climate model calibration using high-dimensional and non-Gaussian space-time data. 

Research Interests:

• Big data issues in climate research: 
• Modeling non-Gaussian and high-dimensional space-time data
• Climate model emulation and calibration
• Conditional simulation of climate processes

Current Research Project at RDCEP:

• Understanding and simulating future space-time precipitation pattern changes  

Publications: 

• Chang, W., Haran, M., Applegate, P.J., Pollard, D. (2015) Calibrating an ice sheet model using high-dimensional non-Gaussian spatial data, accepted for publication in Journal of the American Statistical Association. 
• Chang, W., Haran, M., Olson, R., and Keller, K. (2015) A composite likelihood approach to computer model calibration with high-dimensional spatial data, Statistica Sinica, 25 (1), 243-260 
• Chang, W., Haran, M., Olson, R., and Keller, K. (2014) Fast dimension-reduced climate model calibration and the effect of data aggregation, the Annals of Applied Statistics, 8 (2), 649-673 (Winner of the 2014 American Statistical Association Section on Statistics and the Environment Student Paper Competition) 
• Chang, W., Applegate, P.J., Haran, M. and Keller, K. (2014) Probabilistic calibration of a Greenland Ice Sheet model using spatially-resolved synthetic observations: toward projections of ice mass loss with uncertainties, Geoscientific Model Development, 7, 1933-1943 
• Olson, R., Sriver, R., Chang, W., Haran, M., Urban, N.M., Keller, K. (2013) What is the effect of unresolved internal climate variability on climate sensitivity estimates?, Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, 118 (10), 4348-4358

Yongyang Cai

Senior Research Scientist, Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago

Visiting the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Areas of Expertise:

• Dynamic programming and numerical methods
• Algorithms and applications of mathematical programming in economics, finance and climate change

Cai's research focuses on numerical dynamic programming and its applications in economics, finance and climate change. He has developed several numerical dynamic programming algorithms and a software package for high-dimensional dynamic programming problems with both continuous and discrete states and controls. Examples include optimal growth problems and dynamic portfolio optimization problems. He is currently working on applications of numerical dynamic programming algorithms for solving integrated assessment models of climate and economics with uncertainty.

Cai completed his PhD in 2010 at the Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. 

Research Projects

Dynamic stochastic integrated assessment modeling | FABLE |  | DSICE | Model uncertainty and energy technology policy

Hailiang Du

Research Scientist, Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

• Analysis and prediction of nonlinear systems
• Data Assimilation
• Parameter estimation
• Forecast interpretation and evaluation

Hailiang's research ranges from the advancement of the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems to the application of these insights in the context of large-scale numerical models including weather and climate. He is particularly interested in advancing the understanding of predictability in the context of those models, and better understanding the dynamics, analysis, and interpretation (for decision support) of climate models in general. His previous research work includes parameter estimation via examining the dynamical consistency of the model and via probabilistic skill score; advancing pseudo-orbit data assimilation approach for state estimation; evaluating probabilistic skill in real world ensemble forecasts, and forecast interpretation using sustainable odds. 

Hailiang received his PhD in statistics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2009. He held post-doctoral positions within the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series at LSE before joining RDCEP at the University of Chicago in 2014.

Research Projects

Model fidelity | Shadowing 

Michael Glotter

Researcher, RDCEP

AAAS Fellow, Office of US Senator Al Franken

Alla Golub

Research Economist in Climate Policy, Center for Global Trade Analysis (GTAP)

Purdue University

Areas of Expertise:

• Economic modeling
• Climate change economics

Golub is Research Economist with the Center for Global Trade Analysis (GTAP), Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University. 

She graduated from Purdue in 2006 with Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics. 

Jonathan Winter

Assistant Professor of Geography, Dartmouth

Lars Peter Hansen

Co-PI, RDCEP (2010 - 2015)

Research Director, Becker Friedman Institute

David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor

Department of Economics, University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

• Methodology: Econometrics
• Economics: Asset Pricing

Hansen is a recipient of the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his early research.  Hansen shares this honor with Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller.

Hansen's work explores formal implications of dynamic economic models in which decision makers face uncertain environments. The main theme of his research has been to devise and apply econometric methods that are consistent with the probabilistic framework of the economic models under investigation. His work has implications for consumption, savings investment, and asset pricing. 

Hansen's early research in econometrics was aimed at developing time series statistical methods to investigate one part of an economic model without having to fully specify and estimate all of the model ingredients. The applications he explored with several coauthors included systems that are rich enough to support models of asset valuation and to identify and clarify empirical puzzles, where real-world financial and economic data were at odds with prevailing academic models.

He continues to explore, analyze, and interpret implications of dynamic economic models in environments with uncertainty from a time-series perspective. His recent research explores ways to quantify intertemporal risk-return tradeoffs and ways to model economic behavior when decision makers are uncertain about how to forecast future economic events.

Hansen is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Finance Association. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past president of the Econometric Society. Hansen is a former John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and Sloan Foundation Fellow.

Hansen won the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management "for making fundamental contributions to our understanding of how economic actors cope with risky and changing environments." In 2008, Hansen was awarded the CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications. This award is designed to recognize individuals or groups who contribute original concepts and innovation in the use of mathematical, statistical or computational methods for the study of the behavior of markets, and more broadly of economics. Hansen is one of two scholars to receive the prestigious 2006 Nemmers Prizes in economics and mathematics, believed to be the largest monetary awards in the United States for outstanding achievements in those two disciplines. 

Research Projects

Robustness in Economic Models With Climate Change

Former Students

 Botao Wu   |  Scott Lee  

Thomas Hertel

Distinguished Professor, Agricultural Economics, Purdue University Executive Director and Founder, Center for Global Trade Analysis

Areas of Expertise:

• Climate change impacts and mitigation

• Global land use change

• Global food security and environmental change

Thomas Hertel is Distinguished Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, where his research and teaching focus on international trade, climate change, food and environmental security. Dr. Hertel is a Fellow, and a Past-President, of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). He is also a fellow of the AAAS (2018). Hertel is the founder and Executive Director of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) which now encompasses more than 15,000 researchers in 170 countries around the world (www.gtap.org). This Project maintains a global economic data base and an applied general equilibrium modeling framework which are documented in the book: Global Trade Analysis: Modeling and Applications, edited by Dr. Hertel, and published by Cambridge University Press. He has supervised more than forty PhD students and published more than 120 peer reviewed journal articles, along with several dozen book chapters as well as four books. Professor Hertel is the inaugural recipient of the Purdue University Research and Scholarship Distinction Award. He has also received a number of AAEA awards including: Publication of Enduring Quality, Distinguished Policy Contribution, Outstanding Journal Article and Quality of Communication. He has also been Advisor to two Outstanding AAEA PhD and MS theses.

Research Projects

FABLE

Students

Alla Golub | Jevgenijs Steinbuks

Brent Sohngen

Professor, The Ohio State University Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics

Areas of Expertise:

• Natural Resource & Environmental Economics - Valuing environmental change
• Modeling land-use/land-cover change
• Timber market modeling
• Economics of non-point source pollution

Brent Sohngen is a professor of environmental and resource economics in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at The Ohio State University. He also leads Ohio State’s Environmental Policy Initiative. Dr. Sohngen received his doctorate in environmental and resource economics from Yale University in 1996. He conducts research on the economics of land use change, the design of incentive mechanisms for water and carbon trading, carbon sequestration, and valuation of environmental resources. Dr. Sohngen developed a global forest and land use model that has been widely used to assess the implications of climate change on ecosystems and markets, and to assess the costs of carbon sequestration in forests, including reductions in deforestation. Dr. Sohngen has written or co-written 31 peer-reviewed journal articles, 45 monographs and book chapters. He co-authored sections of the 2001 and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, and he co-authored the forestry chapter of the most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment Report. Additionally, he has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, Energy and Research.  He teaches courses on “Food, Population and the Environment” and “Energy, the Environment, and the Economy”.

Recent Publications

Sedjo, Roger A., and Brent Sohngen. "The Effects of a Federal Tax Reform on the US Timber Sector." (2015).

Sedjo, Roger A., Brent Sohngen, and Anne Riddle. "Land Use Change, Carbon, And Bioenergy Reconsidered." Climate Change Economics 6.01 (2015): 1550002.

Kim, Sei Jin, et al. "THE IMPLICATIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ON NUTRIENT OUTPUTS IN AGRICULTURAL WATERSHEDS."

Sam Ori

Executive Director, EPIC

University of Chicago

Sam Ori is the Executive Director at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC). From 2013 to 2015, he served as Executive Vice President at Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), a Washington, DC-based organization dedicated to reducing American oil dependence in order to enhance economic and national security. From 2007 to 2013, Sam led SAFE’s policy work on a variety of topics, ranging from global oil and natural gas markets to transportation technology. Prior to joining SAFE, Sam spent four years working in the federal government at the Broadcasting Board of Governors and Department of State, including at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India.

Robert Jacob

Computational Climate Scientist, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory Fellow, Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

• Coupled climate models
• Atmospheric science

Robert received his PhD in Atmospheric Science from the University Wisconsin at Madison. He also held post-doctoral positions in climate modeling at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Chicago.

Robert co-developed the Model Coupling Toolkit that is now the main infrastructure for the DOE/NSF Community Earth System Model.  He both develops software for climate modeling and applies the models to problems in climate change and climates of the past.

Early in his career, Robert developed the Fast Ocean Atmosphere Model, one of the first full global climate models to use parallel computing.  It is still used today for problems in past climates.  He currently leads the climate modeling group at Argonne and leads a project on improving the efficiency of climate model analysis.

Research Projects

Model fidelity | Climate Emulation | Precipitation Physics in Climate Models

Students

Laura Zamboni

Recent Publications

Y. Liu, Liu, Z., Zhang, S., Rong, X., Jacob, R. L., Wu, S., and Lu, F., “Ensemble-Based Parameter Estimation In A Coupled GCM Using The Adaptive Spatial Average Method”, Journal of Climate, vol. 27, no. 11, pp. 4002-4014, 2014.

S. Castruccio, McInerney, D. J., Stein, M. L., Liu, F., Jacob, R. L., and Moyer, E. J., “Statistical Emulation of Climate Model Projections Based on Precomputed GCM Runs”, 2013.

P. Balaprakash, Alexeev, Y., Mickelson, S. A., Leyffer, S., Jacob, R. L., and Craig, A. P., “Machine Learning based Load-Balancing for the CESM Climate Modeling Package”, Denver, CO, 2013.

R. L. Jacob, Krishna, J., Xu, X., Tautges, T. J., Grindeanu, I., Latham, R., Peterson, K., Bochev, P., Haley, M.,Brown, D., Brownrigg, R., Shea, D., Huang, W., and Middleton, D. E., “ParNCL and ParGAL: Data Parallel Tools for Post-Processing of Large-Scale Earth Science Data”, in International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2013), Barcelona, Spain, 2013, vol. 18, pp. 1245–1254.