3 Questions: Benjamin Olken on the economic impact of climate change
How is climate change going to affect our economic activity in the future? Many researchers have dug into this subject empirically in recent years, including economists Michael Greenstone and Benjamin Olken of MIT. Now Olken, along with economists Melissa Dell of Harvard University and Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University, has co-authored a lengthy review article for the Journal of Economic Literature, surveying this research and suggesting areas needing further study. Olken sat down with MIT News recently to discuss the climate-economy connection. Q. You’ve just written a review essay about “the new climate-economy literature,” the plethora of studies emerging in the last several years about the effects of climate change on economic activity. What is the approach being used now to study this issue? A. Historically there has been a lot of interest in the question of how climate affects economic activity, from Ibn Khaldun [a 14th-century Tunisian scholar] to...