University of Sussex and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Personal webpage
Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Sussex and the Professor of the Economics of Climate Change, Institute for Environmental Studies and Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is a member of the Academia Europaea.
Previously, he was a Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, the Michael Otto Professor of Sustainability and Global Change at Hamburg University and an Adjunct Professor, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He has had visiting appointments at the Canadian Centre for Climate Research, University of Victoria, British Colombia, at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, University College London, and at the Princeton Environmental Institute and the Department of Economics, Princeton University.
Richard received an M.Sc. in econometrics (1992) and a Ph.D. in economics (1997) from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is ranked among the top 150 economists in the world, and has over 200 publications in learned journals (with 100+ co-authors), one book, three edited volumes, and many minor publications.
He specialises in the economics of energy, environment, and climate, and is interested in tourism and scientometrics
On the January 2021, he presented “The economic impact of climate and weather“ .
Keywords: Climate Change, Weather Shocks, Economic Growth, Stochastic Frontier Analysis
Abstract
I propose a new conceptual framework to disentangle the impacts of weather and climate on
economic activity and growth: A stochastic frontier model with climate in the production
frontier and weather shocks as a source of inefficiency. I test it on a sample of 160 countries
over the period 1950-2014. Temperature and rainfall determine production possibilities in
both rich and poor countries; positively in cold countries and negatively in hot ones.
Weather anomalies reduce inefficiency in rich countries but increase inefficiency in poor and
hot countries; and more so in countries with low weather variability. The climate effect is
larger that the weather effect.