Greenstone Named Director of Hamilton Project
The Hamilton Project, a reckon tank affiliated with the Brookings Institution that was made by former Reserves Secretary Robert Rubin and former Deputy Reserves Secretary Roger Altman to come up with new policies aimed at widely mutual prosperity, named economist Michael Greenstone, a professor of environment economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to be its director.
The job has been a fantastic career go for plot wonks who lean towards the Democrats. The founding director, Peter O. Orszag, left in the fall of 2007 to become the director of the Congressional Budget Office and is now director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. He was succeeded by Jason Furman, who left in June 2008 to direct economic plot for the Obama presidential campaign, and now facility in the White House. And he was succeeded by Douglas Elmendorf, who became director of the CBO in January 2009. The Hamilton post has been empty since then.
For the past year, Greenstone has been chief economist on the staff of the White House Assembly of Economic Advisers. Greenstone received a PhD in economics from Princeton University in 1998 and a BA in economics with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1991.
His literary work is focused on identifying government?s appropriate role — through regulations, taxes, or spending — in a market economy. He is currently engaged in a project to estimate the economic costs of climate change and has worked extensively on the Clean Air Act. He argues that government environmental regulation has improved air quality, chief to reductions in infant mortality rates and higher housing values, while also imposing costs through reducing the scale of manufacturing endeavor. Greenstone also has done research on topics ranging from the beneficial impacts of mandatory disclosure laws on stock prices to the role of antidiscrimination laws in reducing African-American infant mortality rates.