About:
- I am a fourth 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 Earning from Recycling (draft available upon request)
Recycling—collecting discarded items and redeeming their scrap value—channels income to marginalized populations. This paper evaluates the impact of bottle bills, a policy that substantially increased the scrap value of beverage containers to a level comparable to aggregate food stamp benefits, on U.S. household food expenditures and birth outcomes. Bottle bills have a theoretically ambiguous impact on earnings from recycling. This paper (i) illustrates this ambiguity, (ii) documents that bottle bills do, in fact, raise earnings—boosting food expenditures by approximately 12% among low-income able-bodied households—and (iii) shows that recycling earnings are both economically significant and widespread. Bottle bill-induced income gains improve birth outcomes to a degree comparable to food stamps, a widely studied welfare program. Specifically, bottle bills reduce the incidence of low birth weight by 2.5% among mothers without a high school diploma—roughly one-quarter the effect of food stamps on recipients. This surprising comparability between a waste policy and a major welfare program reflects both the substantial aggregate scrap value generated by bottle bills and the different populations each policy 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.