Public Economics and Environment

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

• Be able to work collaboratively with others, tolerate differences of opinion, listen to others, express your views, even critical ones, while respecting others, be able to adapt to unexpected situations, and ensure that deadlines are met.
•    Be familiar with current events in the business world and public regulations for the sectors covered by the program.
• Be able to find, prioritize, understand, organize, and synthesize information on a given subject from academic literature, public, private, or non-profit institutions, the press, and statistical sources.
• Be able to communicate clearly and appropriately to the target audience in both written and oral form.
•    Be able to understand academic work in the field of economic analysis, identify its strengths and weaknesses, whether written or presented orally, in English and French.
•    Be able to design, structure, and conduct an economic analysis, clearly defining the issue, justifying its relevance in light of academic and public debates, identifying useful elements to address it, proposing a solid methodology to provide answers, carrying out this process, interpreting the results obtained, and accurately recognizing 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 why it is difficult to infer cause-and-effect relationships from statistical data in the social sciences, and know the main methods for overcoming this difficulty.
• Have acquired experience in econometric analysis of statistical data.
•    Understand the role of surveys in obtaining useful information for the ex-ante evaluation of private and public projects, including the risks of bias, in order to develop a survey protocol tailored to the objectives pursued.
•    Understand how economists adapt experimental methods to behavioral analysis, 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.

• Understand and master the analysis of competitive markets and the strategic behavior of actors exercising market power, particularly in the context of markets whose activities have an impact on natural resources or ecosystems.
•    Understand the terms and conditions 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 among households, income distribution, the impact on public administration budgets, the extraction of natural resources, and pollutant emissions.
•    Understand the economic approach to collective decision-making and the organization of public intervention, as well as the economic principles of market regulation and regulations, particularly in the environmental field.
• Be able to produce an applied version of an economic model in order to simulate alternative scenarios and perform quantified exercises in comparative statics or dynamics.
•    Acquire knowledge of regulations, societal issues, and economic literature dealing with certain subjects of study related to environmental economics, such as underground resources, air pollution, biodiversity, agroforestry resources, organic farming, and fishery resources.