About:
- I am a fifth year PhD student in Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
- I research how U.S. public institutions shape/are shaped by natural resource use and the environment.
- Previously, I worked as a research assistant at the Climate Impact Lab.
- I hold a BA from Bowdoin College in Economics.
Email: m [dot] a [dot] norman [at] columbia [dot] edu
Working papers:
click title for abstract
The Importance of Earnings from Recycling (link)
Recycling — collecting discarded items and redeeming their scrap value — channels income to marginalized populations. This paper evaluates the importance and prevalence of these earnings throughout the US. Specifically, this paper shows that positive shocks in recycling earnings increase household food expenditures and improve birth outcomes. Bottle bills — a policy requiring refundable deposits on beverage containers — boost food expenditures by approximately 10.2%, increasing recycling earnings by roughly $1400/year (in 2015 dollars) — an amount achievable by collecting 38 containers per day during the sample period. The effect is concentrated among low-income, able bodied households — a population likely to recycle for cash. Moreover, recycling earnings increases improve birth outcomes — a proxy for economic well-being in low-income populations. Back-of-the-envelope calculations imply that informal recycling markets are 50% as effective as food stamps at reducing the incidence of low birth weight. The striking comparability between recycling earnings and a targeted welfare program can be explained by both the size of recycling generated income and the distinct populations each income source reaches.
Empirical Tests of the Green Paradox for Climate Legislation w. Wolfram Schlenker (link)
The Green Paradox posits that fossil fuel markets respond to changing expectations about climate legislation, which limits future consumption, by shifting consumption to the present through lower present-day prices. We demonstrate that oil futures responded negatively to daily changes in the prediction market's expectations that the Waxman-Markey bill — the US climate bill discussed in 2009-2010 — would pass. This effect is consistent across various maturities as the proposed legislation would reset the entire price and consumption path, unlike temporary supply or demand shocks that phase out over time. The bill’s passage would have increased current global oil consumption by 2-4%. Furthermore, a strengthening of climate policy, as measured by monthly variations in media salience regarding climate policy over the last four decades, and two court rulings signaling limited future fossil fuel use, were associated with negative abnormal oil future returns. Taken together, our findings confirm that restricting future fossil fuel use will accelerate current-day consumption.