Finding local solutions to a global problem
MIT Economics PhD Student Aaron Berman ’26 on combating climate change, one case study at a time
Photo Provided by Aaron Berman
It’s not easy to convince world leaders to risk their country’s economic output in favor of regulating carbon dioxide emissions, plastic production, and overfishing. Just a few months ago, the plastic pollution treaty talks at the United Nations adjourned after ten “hard-fought” futile days of negotiations.
Research by environmental economics PhD student Aaron Berman ’26 could help change that. Berman studies the trade-offs between conservation and economic growth in developing countries in order to develop effective policies for protecting natural resources. Now in the final year of his PhD, Berman sat down with The Tech to talk about his career trajectory and the questions that guide him.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tech: What led you to do research in economics, and why is it exciting to you?
Berman: I did my undergrad at Yale, and then I did my Master’s of Public Health, also at Yale, for one extra year. During the transition from my undergrad coursework to my master’s coursework, I realized that a lot of the most fascinating questions were questions that economists tried to answer using very rigorous empirical methods. Because I’ve always been more quantitatively inclined, and because economics uses a lot of math and data, I thought that would be a really cool thing to do.
What continues to amaze me about economics as a field is that I very regularly have these moments of surprise and excitement to learn of a new kind of question that economists somewhere are answering. I have classmates who are thinking about the structure of supply chains, how cities develop, unemployment, and the consequences of job search decisions. Economics really gives you a tool to think about the world and how the world works, to ask questions such as, “Are there ways that the world could work better, and for whom?” I think it’s really cool that people are able to answer so many different questions within this discipline.
TT: What has your research been like so far?
Berman: In a lot of social sciences research, the questions that people ask can be a bit abstract, and the way that people write research papers can be a bit abstract. One of the things that I’ve always placed value and emphasis on in my own research approach is wanting to experience things firsthand and getting a qualitative sense of how people [are] actually affected by the issues that I’m interested in. Even if it’s not directly doing interviews or collecting survey data that goes into my papers, it gives me a better worldview of what’s really going on and how the world really works.
One research project that I’m working on now is looking at small- and medium-sized manufacturing firms in Turkey. These are firms that produce a lot of heavy manufactured goods like metal, iron, steel, aluminum, cement: products that produce a lot of carbon emissions. Those firms export a lot of those products to the European Union, and in the coming years, the European Union is hoping to introduce a tax on imported goods, where the tax is proportional to how much carbon was emitted in the production of those goods.
From a global perspective, that tax is probably a good thing, because carbon emissions lead to climate change. A country like Turkey, where there’s more [of these] small- and medium-sized manufacturing firms making these products, is going to benefit from the lower carbon emissions, but is going to lose economically because they’re going to have to face higher taxes on their products and potentially lose access to European markets that they were previously exporting to.
We’re trying to evaluate if there are particular policies that a government can introduce or investments that firms themselves can undertake to make their manufacturing process less carbon intensive. And would the costs of undertaking those kinds of policies or investments be offset by the benefits that firms would receive in terms of continuing to have access to high value export markets like Europe?
We’re doing a randomized control trial with several hundred manufacturing firms in Turkey, where in some set of those firms, we give them the opportunity to directly invest in technologies to reduce the carbon content of their emissions, and in some of the other groups of firms, we indirectly target carbon emissions by helping them improve their productivity. We’re going to compare carbon emissions and economic outcomes like sales and exports amongst the different groups of firms that we’ve randomized in our study.
Low- and middle-income countries like Turkey want to be able to grow. They want to be able to promote economic growth amongst their small firms. But in the 21st century, that sometimes comes into conflict with global goals to reduce carbon emissions.
TT: What do you hope to research after your PhD?
Berman: One big question that comes to my mind when thinking about economics of the environment and natural resources is that most of today’s biggest and most pressing environmental issues are global in scope. Things like global warming, carbon emissions, but also things like overfishing [and] plastic pollution are challenges that countries have tried to come together to address through international cooperation.
In most of these cases, [attempts at] agreement or consensus have failed. In the Paris Agreement, there was actually an agreement reached, but you can argue that in recent years, countries have started to kind of pull back from those commitments. The big question on my mind is, how can countries cooperate on environmental issues that span beyond the boundaries of any one particular country? What are the incentives or disincentives that countries face when they think about entering these kinds of agreements? Are there types of agreements or particular arrangements that can sustain cooperation in the absence of one big global government that’s just setting policy for everyone?
Less industrialized or developing countries are typically more affected by these problems and also have contributed less to the problems historically. How should those considerations be weighed when we're thinking about international cooperation?
These are very broad, big-picture questions that I’m starting to chip away at in individual case studies, but are really driving my research agenda moving forward.