Nathan Chan

About

Nathan Chan is a professor at the Department of Resource Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, affiliated with the Computational Social Science Institute. His research investigates key challenges in environmental management and energy policy, with a primary focus on environmental public goods. He studies a wide variety of topics including global climate change mitigation, energy efficiency policy, markets for environmentally-friendly products, nonmarket valuation, and pollution control. He applies methods from theoretical, empirical, and experimental economics in his work, contributing to the understanding and development of policies aimed at addressing environmental and energy issues. His research aims to inform effective strategies for environmental sustainability and energy efficiency, leveraging diverse economic approaches to tackle complex environmental challenges.

Research topics

• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public economics
• Business
• Computer science

Selected publications

• Climate Change and Recreation: Evidence from North American Cycling

  Environmental and Resource Economics · 2020-04-22 · 59 citations

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Evaluating the use of semi-structured crowdsourced data to quantify inequitable access to urban biodiversity: A case study with eBird

  PLoS ONE · 2022-11-09 · 29 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Credibly estimating social-ecological relationships requires data with broad coverage and fine geographic resolutions that are not typically available from standard ecological surveys. Open and unstructured data from crowdsourced platforms offer an opportunity for collecting large quantities of user-submitted ecological data. However, the representativeness of the areas sampled by these data portals is not well known. We investigate how data availability in eBird, one of the largest and most pop…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cost-effective giving with multiple public goods

  Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2020-04-06 · 26 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  In this paper, we investigate how the choice environment affects contribution behavior in settings with multiple public goods. Specifically, we design a novel experiment that uses a standard voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) game, except that subjects face multiple simultaneous VCMs, each with a different marginal per capita return (MPCR). We study two treatments—one with constrained contribution choices and one with a richer set of options—finding that the constrained choice environment yi…

  PublisherDOI

• Environmental and Natural Resource Economics and Systemic Racism

  Review of Environmental Economics and Policy · 2023-12-21 · 16 citations

  articleCorresponding

  This article highlights some ways in which scholarly work in environmental and natural resource economics may be affected by, and may unintentionally further, racial inequity. We discuss four channels through which these effects may occur. The first is prioritization of efficiency over distribution. The second is inattention to procedural justice. The third involves abstraction away from crucial historical or social contexts. The fourth is a narrow focus on problems that fit neatly within existi…

  PublisherDOI

• On generosity in public good and charitable dictator games

  Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2024-07-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  We examine the relationship between generosity in charitable dictator games (CDGs) and public good games (PGGs). We construct a novel generalized game that subsumes both as special cases and present experimental subjects with different blends of CDG and PGG tasks. Generosity in the CDG and PGG are only weakly correlated, in spite of close experimental control on confounding factors. We furthermore demonstrate how underlying preferences shape these behaviors, revealing important distinctions betw…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dieter Stiers

  KU Leuven

  13 shared

• Gunnar Otte

  10 shared

• Amélie Godefroidt

  KU Leuven

  10 shared

• Jan Paul Heisig

  WZB Berlin Social Science Center

  10 shared

• Andrea Förster

  Bradford Royal Infirmary

  10 shared

• Nils D. Steiner

  Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

  10 shared

• Joan E. Madia

  University of Oxford

  10 shared

• Katharina Burgdorf

  University of Bremen

  10 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Yale University

  2014

• M.P.A.

  Columbia University

  2009

• B.S.

  California Institute of Technology

  2008

Similar researchers at University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Joshua Braunh-60
• Arindrajit Dubeh-36
• Erin Bakerh-34