Overview

​We are now offering this course for the fourth time thanks to the people who trusted me from the beginning and accepted to be part of it. After receiving the best PhD course prize in 2018, it was offered again in 2019. Yet, we had to skip the year 2020 due to Covid-19. Then we offered the course online in 2021, and it worked well. You can find out more about the previous years' using the following links: 2018 , 2019, 2021. More information about the community is here.

We also have a group called BEEn (Behavioural Environmental Economics Network) which aims to bring scholars together working on issues related to environmental and resource economics from a behavioural perspective. BEEn collects and disseminate information about related conferences, research and announcements. If you want to learn more about the group and become a member, click here.

This year, the course will be given online again.

The course aims to provide understanding of topics in environmental and resource economics from a behavioural economics perspective. Students will learn how to apply the theory and the methods such as field and laboratory experiments to the environmental issues to discover how individuals actually behave, and how normative theories and frameworks fail to capture the actual behaviour.

There is no tuition fee.

Here is the reading list for BEE2022

​​Masters and PhD

7.5 ECTS

There will be a take home exam after the lecture period, you will be given plenty of time to complete it. In order to take the exam, you are required to attend the lectures during the lecture period 28 November-7 December 2022.

This course composed of lectures and student seminars to get feedback from the lecturers and other students. Download Program.

​The course especially invites graduate students who are working on topics in environmental economics from a behavioural economics perspective. Master students, early career researchers and students from other fields of social sciences are also welcomed to participate in the course. While applying for the course, each student will be asked to write a max. 300 words text describing their current work and research interests. The text will be used in selection process and if accepted to allocate the student's seminar to the related section.

The course is specifically aimed at PhD students within the field of social sciences in particular economics. Knowledge in basic microeconomics and good knowledge in English is vital to be able to follow the course.

28 November 2022 - 7 December 2022; ONLINE

Lecture days: November 28th, 29th, 30th and December 1st, 6th, 7th (6 days in total).

Lecturers

Arild Angelsen is a professor of economics at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). He has over the past two decades done extensive research and published on causes of tropical deforestation, and its interaction with poverty, tenure and government policies. Recent work deals with how efforts to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) can be included in a global climate regime, and the national strategies and policies needed to achieve REDD+. He has edited three REDD+ books that have become standard references in the debate. Angelsen was global coordinator of the Poverty Environment Network (PEN), a CIFOR-led research programme collecting detailed information from 8 000 households in 24 developing countries on forest uses and management. He has also used field experiments to study human behaviour and the impact of policy interventions for sustainable resource use. He has broad field experience from Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa, and is editor of a book on field research methods. Personal Web

Eline van der Heijden is Professor of Experimental Economics and member of the Tilburg Sustainability Center at Tilburg University. She began conducting experiments research during her promotion research and has since then done experimental and behavioral research on a wide range of subjects such as public goods and other social dilemma situations, the role of time, risk and social preferences in behavior, and leadership. She has experience with lab experiments, with large scale online experiments among a representative sample of the Dutch population, as well as field experiments. Van der Heijden uses these experiments to answer more fundamental research questions, but also to study more applied policy questions for various Dutch ministries, the OECD and the EU. In the past five years she has conducted a number of experimental lab and field studies in the field of environmental economics, including research into investments in energy-efficient technologies for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), households in the field of sustainable consumption, dynamic coordination games, and payments for ecosystem services schemes. Personal Web

Dr. Sara le Roux is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Oxford Brookes University. Her main research interests include the theoretical and experimental analysis of individual’s perception of ambiguity and decision choices made by individuals in the presence of ambiguity. Currently a number of policy questions involve ambiguity, in particular, potential threats resulting from climate change and environmental damage. Dr. le Roux uses experiments to analyse whether individuals make optimal decisions when faced by uncertain weather events, and if individuals can be “nudged” towards making better decisions. Personal Web

After completing her PhD in Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics 2005, she joined the research staff at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. She became one of the Beijer program leaders, a position which she still holds today, for Behavior, Economics and Nature Network (BENN) (2010). The aim of her research is to generate a better understanding of human behavior (drivers, motivators and actions) in social-ecological systems, which can range from the individual and collective behavior of resource users facing different forms of social- ecological conditions (such as more or less predictable abrupt ecosystem changes, different market conditions etc.), to the (un)sustainable behavior of the average citizen/consumer. She employs a mix of experimental (lab and field), empirical and theoretical (mainly game theory) methods in her research. Lately she has also been combining these with social simulation (Agent-Based Models). Personal Web

Chandra Kiran Krishnamurthy is an Associate Professor at the Department of Forest Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Economics (SLU) at Umeå. He is an environmental and resource economist with interests relating to understanding how energy markets function and economic policies for regulating pollution and enhancing natural resource conservation, including the question of discounting and natural resource management with regime shifts. He uses both empirical and theoretical methods in his research. He has also been engaged on work related to transportation in the recent past, including on evaluating the extent to which ride hailing firms such as Uber affect air pollution and traffic congestion. Personal Web

Jessica Barker is an Affiliated Researcher at Aarhus University's Interacting Minds Centre, Denmark. Currently living in Alaska, she is a Public Health Data Analyst for the State government, and advises the Alaska Vaccine Task Force on behavioural economics. Prior to this, she worked at the Behavioural Insights Team in London, where she was a member of the Energy, Environment & Sustainability team, focusing in particular on promoting sustainable food consumption and conservation behaviour. Her background is in evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology, and she spent two postdoctoral fellowships investigating when and why people - and other animals - behave pro-socially.

Camilla Widmark (Senior researcher), is mainly doing research and teaching as well as administrative issues at the Department of Forest Economics (vice head of department). From January 1st, 2017, Camilla is head of office for EFINORD (The North European Office of the European Forest Institute). Camilla is mainly doing teaching in forest policy, but also in business administration and economics. In research the focus is mainly on land use policy, land use conflicts, especially focusing on common pool resources, governance issues, ecosystem services and forest policy, especially evaluation of forest policy. At present the Future Forests program's project on evaluation of the Swedish Forestry Model is in its final stages, while the FP 7 ERA-NET SUMFOREST funded project POLYFORES (Decision-making Support for Forest Ecosystem Services in Europe) is starting December 2016, where Camilla is doing research as well as coordinating the project. Camilla has also during 2016 and 2017 been appointed to the High Level Expert Panel on Food Security and Nutrition dealing with Sustainable forestry for food security and nutrition. Personal Web

Oben Bayrak designed the course in 2018 and offered it in 2018 and 2019 together with all of the lecturers. The course/event received the best PhD course in 2018 from SLU. Oben Bayrak’s research is in behavioural economics and can be classified as both theoretical and experimental. His research focuses on preference imprecision, anomalies of standard economic theory, behavioral biases and decision making under uncertainty. With John Hey, he developed a new decision theory for decisions under risk known as Dispersion-Skewness Theory of decisions under risk. The relevant paper was published in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in 2020. As shown in the paper, the new theory outperforms many prominent theories in the literature in terms of goodness of fit and shows a reasonable performance in predictive ability. It can incorporate the prominent anomalies of standard theory such as the Allais paradox, the valuation gap, and preference reversals, and also the behavioural patterns observed in experiments that cannot be explained by Rank Dependent Utility Theory. Personal Web