R. Jisung Park, Ph.D.

R. Jisung Park, Ph.D. is assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds appointments in the School of Social Policy and Practice and the Wharton School of Business. An environmental and labor economist, he has been investigating and writing about the economics of climate change for more than a decade. Prof. Park is also a research affiliate at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), a faculty affiliate of the California Policy Lab (CPL), and a faculty fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Penn, he was a member of the faculty at UCLA, and a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard.

Prof. Park’s research combines data, quasi-experimental methods, and economic analysis to better understand the implications of environmental change for human flourishing, and how effective policy responses may be designed. For instance, his work on heat and learning uses data from millions of test scores to understand how the physical environment in which learning occurs may affect educational achievement gaps, how climate change may influence economic inequality, and what this might imply for public policy regarding climate mitigation and adaptation. Ongoing work examines such topics as the effects of extreme heat on workers and labor market inequality, the consequences of natural disasters for human capital, and the process by which workers and firms adapt to a changing environment.

Prof. Park received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, where he was an NSF Fellow, and master’s degrees in Environmental Change and Management (MSc) and Development Economics (MSc) from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His work has been published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Human Resources, Nature Human Behavior, Nature Energy, and the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, and is widely cited in such media outlets as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, BBC, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and NPR.

Prof. Park has also advised policymakers and practitioners including in the form of Congressional Testimony for the U.S. House of Representatives, and briefings for the United Nations, the World Bank, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Labor, the California State Legislature, the United Kingdom Department for International Development, United Technologies, UBS, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.