Authors

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. In addition, he serves as the founding director of the University’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth and the director of the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. He was previously the director of the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics.

During the Obama Administration, he served as the Chief Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he proposed and then co-led the development of the United States Government’s social cost of carbon. He is an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, a Carnegie Fellow (aka the “Brainy Award”), and a former editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Formerly, Greenstone was the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT and directed The Hamilton Project.

Greenstone’s research, which has influenced policy in the United States and globally, is focused on the global energy challenge that requires all societies to balance the needs for inexpensive and reliable energy, protection of the public’s health from air pollution, and minimizing the damages from climate change. Recently, his research has helped lead to the United States Government quadrupling its estimate of the damages from climate change, the adoption of pollution markets in India, and the use of machine learning techniques to target environmental inspections. As a co-director of the Climate Impact Lab, he is producing empirically grounded estimates of the local and global impacts of climate change.

He created the Air QualityLife Index® that converts air pollution concentrations into their impact on life expectancy and co-founded Climate Vault, a 501(c)(3) that uses markets to allow institutions and people to reduce their carbon footprint and foster innovation in carbon dioxide removal.

Greenstone received a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and a B.A. in Economics with High Honors from Swarthmore College.

Christian Leuz is the Charles F. Pohl Professor of Accounting and Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research and Leibniz Institute SAFE, EPIC Scholar, a Fellow at the European Corporate Governance Institute, Goethe Universität Frankfurt’s Center for Financial Studies, and of the CESifo Research Network. He is a co-organizer and a member of the IGM’s European Economic Experts Panel. He studies the role of disclosure and transparency in capital markets and other settings, including sustainability and ESG; the economic effects of regulation; international accounting; corporate governance and finance. His work has been published in many top academic journals including Science, Journal of Finance, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Accounting & Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. He has received several awards and honors, including the Class of 2023 Phoenix Award, the 2022 ACA Prize in Financial Governance, the 2016 and the 2014 Distinguished Contribution to the Accounting Literature Awards, and a Humboldt Research Award in 2012. He is recognized as a “Highly Cited Researcher” by Thomson Reuters and was included in their list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” five years in a row (from 2014 to 2018). Professor Leuz is an editor for the Journal of Accounting Research and has served on many editorial boards, including the Journal of Accounting & Economics, The Accounting Review, the Journal of Business, Finance and Accounting, and the Review of Accounting Studies.

Born in Germany, Professor Leuz earned his doctoral degree and Habilitation at the Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany.

Patricia Breuer is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the Erasmus School of Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a Research Fellow of TRR 266 Accounting for Transparency. Her research investigates the impact of financial and environmental reporting regulations on economic activity. Breuer received her PhD in accounting from the University of Mannheim, her masters in business administration from the Ludwig-Maximilians University and her bachelors degree in economics and business administration from Eberhard Karls University.