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 Earnings 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, which increased the scrap value of beverage containers to levels comparable with aggregate food stamp benefits, on U.S. household food expenditures and birth outcomes. While the effect of bottle bills on recycling income is theoretically ambiguous, this paper (i) outlines the sources of that 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) demonstrates that recycling income is both economically meaningful and broadly accessed. The resulting income gains lead to improvements in birth outcomes comparable to those from food stamps. Specifically, bottle bills reduce the incidence of low birth weight by 2.5% among mothers without a high school diploma--approximately one-quarter the magnitude of food stamps' effect. This surprising parity between a waste policy and a targeted welfare program highlights the sizable income generated by container redemption and the distinct populations each policy serves.
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.