Christopher D. Timmins is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Duke University, with a secondary appointment in Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He holds a BSFS degree from Georgetown University and a PhD in Economics from Stanford University. Professor Timmins was an Assistant Professor in the Yale Department of Economics before joining the faculty at Duke in 2004. His professional activities include teaching, research, and editorial responsibilities. Professor Timmins specializes in natural resource and environmental economics, but he also has interests in industrial organization, development, public and regional economics. He works on developing new methods for non-market valuation of local public goods and amenities, with a particular focus on hedonic techniques and models of residential sorting. Professor Timmins is a research associate in the Environmental and Energy Economics group at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has served as a reviewer for numerous environmental, urban, and applied microeconomics journals. He currently serves on the editorial board of the American Economic Review and is a co-editor of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
Spencer Banzhaf is a Professor in the Dept. of Economics at Georgia State’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. He also is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). Banzhaf’s primary field of study is environmental policy analysis, especially related to the urban environment (such as sprawl and land use) and to issues related to energy and air pollution (including effects on ecosystems as well as urban environments). Banzhaf received his PhD from Duke University in 2001. Prior to coming to GSU, he was a fellow at Resources for the Future.
Nick Kuminoff is an Associate Professor in the Economics Department at Arizona State University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research aims to infer consumer preferences for non-market amenities from their sorting behavior in markets for housing, labor, health care and other goods. Recent projects include developing national satellite accounts for non-market expenditures, predicting the distributional welfare effects of choice architecture policies, examining how long term pollution exposure affects cognitive functioning and decision making by the elderly, and estimating the value of a statistical life. Kuminoff’s research has been funded by EPA, NIH, NSF and other agencies, and published in journals such as the American Economic Review, International Economic Review, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Proceedings of the Royal Society-B, Ecohealth, PLoS-ONE, and Water Resources Research. Kuminoff obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from North Carolina State University (2006) and MS (2000) and BS (1999) degrees in Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics from the University of California-Davis.
Siqi Zheng is the Samuel Tak Lee Associate Professor at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Center for Real Estate. Her field of specialization is urban and environmental economics, urban development and real estate market, with a special focus on China. She published in many peer reviewed English journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Geography, European Economic Review, Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Transportation Research Part A, Environment and Planning A, Ecological Economics, Journal of Regional Science, Real Estate Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. A book she has co-authored, Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China (Princeton University Press) was published in May 2016. She has also published more than 100 papers and two books in Chinese. She is the Associated Editor ofJournal of Economic Surveys, and is on the editorial board of Journal of Housing Economics and International Real Estate Review. She is the Vice General Secretary of the Global Chinese Real Estate Congress and on the board of the Asian Real Estate Society. Dr. Zheng has completed or been undertaking research projects granted or entrusted by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, and the National Statistics Bureau of China, among others. She received her Ph.D. in urban development and real estate from Tsinghua University in 2005, and did her post-doc research at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Prior to coming to MIT, she was a professor and the director of Hang Lung Center for Real Estate at Tsinghua University, China.