Michael Greenstone

Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, University of Chicago; Director, Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. In addition, he serves as faculty director of the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and was recently announced as the founding director of the University’s new Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth. He was previously the director of the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics.

During the Obama Administration, he served as the Chief Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he proposed and then co-led the development of the United States Government’s social cost of carbon. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, a Carnegie Fellow (aka the “Brainy Award”), and a former editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Formerly, Greenstone was the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT and directed The Hamilton Project.

Greenstone’s research, which has influenced policy in the United States and globally, is focused on the global energy challenge that requires all societies to balance the needs for inexpensive and reliable energy, protection of the public’s health from air pollution, and minimizing the damages from climate change. Recently, his research has helped lead to the United States Government quadrupling its estimate of the damages from climate change, the adoption of pollution markets in India, and the use of machine learning techniques to target environmental inspections. As a co-director of the Climate Impact Lab, he is producing empirically grounded estimates of the local and global impacts of climate change. He created the Air Quality Life Index® that converts air pollution concentrations into their impact on life expectancy and co-founded Climate Vault, a 501(c)(3) that uses markets to allow institutions and people to reduce their carbon footprint and foster innovation in carbon dioxide removal.

Greenstone received a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and a B.A. in Economics with High Honors from Swarthmore College.

Contact Information

Michael Greenstone
mgreenst@uchicago.edu
773-702-8250

Christine Spencer (General Inquiries)
Senior Executive Assistant
christines1@uchicago.edu
773-834-7051

Vicki Ekstrom High (Media Inquiries)
vekstrom@uchicago.edu

Mailing Address
University of Chicago
Department of Economics
1126 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637

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Non-profit using the power of compliance markets to reduce + remove CO2 emissions, while supporting CDR tech innovation.

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Accelerating organizations’ ability to achieve verifiable, scalable, and immediate carbon reduction + ultimate removal.

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