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Videos

Microeconomics and the Environment

How can economics help us make better conservation decisions? In this lecture, we will go over two core economic concepts — trade-offs and opportunity costs — and how they shape decisions about land use and conservation.

When Markets Fail: Understanding Externalities in Environmental Economics

Externalities are a key concept in microeconomics and environmental economics. They occur when individual or firm actions, such as producing goods, consuming resources, or polluting, impact other people or the environment in ways that markets don’t account for. In this video, I explain how externalities cause market failures, provide a real-world example, and discuss economic policies that can help correct these inefficiencies.

An introduction to Environmental Pure Public Goods

Dive into the microeconomic reasons why the free market is fantastic at providing private goods (like pizza!) but fundamentally fails when it comes to essential environmental resources like clean air and a stable climate.

Common Resources and the Tragedy of the Commons

This video introduces common resources and the tragedy of the commons from an environmental economics perspective, using examples to explain why shared natural resources are often overexploited and difficult to manage sustainably.

From Market Failures to Solutions - Summary of Previous Lectures

Here we revisit the core market failures (externalities, public goods, and common resources) and explore the economic “toolbox” used to fix them. We also look at two real-world case studies from the US and Canada.