Public economics and the environment

The course aims to train economists specializing in economics and public policy as applied to environmental issues.

- Know how to work in collaboration with others, tolerate differences of opinion, know how to listen to others, succeed in expressing even critical points of view with respect for others, be able to adapt to unexpected situations, ensure deadlines are met.
- Know what's going on in the business world and in public regulations for the sectors covered 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, both orally and in writing.
- Ability to understand academic work in the field of economic analysis, and to identify its strengths and weaknesses, in both written and oral form, in English and French.
- Be able to conceive, structure and conduct an economic analysis, by clearly defining the problem, motivating its interest in the light of academic and public debates, identifying the useful elements to seek to answer it, proposing a sound methodology to provide elements of response, carrying out this approach, interpreting the results obtained and precisely recognizing their limits. 

- Know how to handle a database and prepare it for analysis, 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 for overcoming this.
- Have acquired experience in econometric analysis of statistical data.
- Know the role of surveys in obtaining useful information for the ex-ante evaluation of private and public projects, understanding the risks of bias in order to build a survey protocol adapted to the objectives pursued.
- Know how economists adapt the experimental method to the analysis of behavior, and understand the protocols of experiments conducted in the laboratory or in the field.
- Know how to carry out a financial evaluation of a private or public project.

- Understand and master the analysis of competitive markets and the strategic behavior of players exercising market power, particularly in the context of markets whose activities have an impact on natural resources or ecosystems.
- Understand the methods of public intervention in economic activities, know how to justify them and analyze their consequences, in terms of changes in the use of production factors, the allocation of consumption between households, income distribution, the impact on government budgets, the extraction of natural resources and pollutant emissions.
- Be familiar with the economic approach to collective decision-making and the organization of public intervention, as well as the economic principles of market regulation and environmental regulation.
- Be able to create an applied version of an economic model in order to simulate alternative scenarios and carry out quantified exercises in comparative statics or dynamics.
- Acquire knowledge of regulations, societal issues and the economic literature dealing with certain environmental economics topics, such as subsoil resources, atmospheric pollution, biodiversity, agroforestry resources, organic farming and fishery resources.