Public Economics and the Environment

The objective of the program is to train economists specializing in economics and public policy applied to environmental problems.

- Know how to work in collaboration with others, tolerate differences of opinion, know how to listen to others, succeed in expressing one's own points of view, even critical ones, while respecting others, be able to adapt to unexpected situations, ensure that deadlines are met.
- Know the current state of affairs in the business world and public regulations for the sectors targeted by the training.
- Know how to find, prioritize, understand, organize and synthesize information on a given subject, from academic literature, public, private or associative institutions, the press, statistical sources.
- Know how to communicate clearly and in a manner adapted to the target audience in written and oral form.
- Be able to understand academic works in the field of economic analysis, to identify their strong and critical points, whether they are written works or presented orally, in English and in French.
- Be able to conceive, structure and conduct an economic analysis, by clearly defining the problem, motivating its interest in light of academic and public debates, identifying the elements useful in seeking to answer it, proposing a solid methodology to provide elements of response, carrying out this approach, interpreting the results obtained and recognizing precisely their limitations. 

- Know how to handle a database and prepare it for analysis, know how to produce a data analysis and present the results.
- Understand the reasons for the difficulty of inferring cause and effect relationships from statistical data in the social sciences, and know the main methods to overcome this.
- Have acquired experience in econometric analysis of statistical data.
- Know the role of surveys to obtain useful information for the ex-ante evaluation of private and public projects, by understanding the risks of bias in order to build a survey protocol adapted to the objectives pursued.
- Know the adaptation of the experimental method by economists to the analysis of behaviors, and understand the protocols of experiments conducted in the laboratory or in the field.
- Know how to conduct a financial evaluation of a private or public project.

- To know and master the analysis of competitive markets, of strategic behaviors of actors exercising market power, notably in the context of markets whose activity has an impact on natural resources or ecosystems.
- To understand the modalities of public interventions in economic activities, to know how to justify them and to analyze their consequences, in terms of modification of the use of factors of production, of allocation of consumption between households, of distribution of income, of impact on the budget of public administrations, of withdrawal of natural resources and of polluting emissions
- To know the economic approach to collective decision making and to the organization of public interventions, as well as the economic principles of market regulations and environmental regulations.
- To be able to carry out an applied version of an economic model in order to simulate alternative scenarios and to carry out quantified exercises of comparative statics or dynamics.
- Acquire knowledge of regulations, societal issues and economic literature dealing with certain objects of study related to environmental economics, such as subsoil resources, atmospheric pollution, biodiversity, agroforestry resources, organic agriculture, and fishery resources.