James K. Boyce is an author, naturalist, economist, and senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also Professor Emeritus of Economics.

Jim grew up in Michigan. He received his B.A. at Yale University and his doctorate from Oxford University.

He began his professional career as a development economist, after having lived and worked in India and Bangladesh prior to graduate school. As a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad Nacional in Costa Rica, he helped establish a master’s program in sustainable development and ecological economics for Central America and the Caribbean. He led the Adjustment Toward Peace project for the United Nations Development Program in postwar El Salvador, and received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for research and writing on the economics of peacebuilding.

He has written for Harper’s, Scientific American, Politico, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous scholarly journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ecological Economics, Environmental Research Letters, and Climatic Change.

Jim received the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought and the 2011 Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage Award from Project Censored and the Media Freedom Foundation.

Read an interview about Jim’s career here.

By this expert

Carbon Dividends: The Bipartisan Key to Climate Policy?

Article | Feb 13, 2017

The practical question in Washington today is not whether regulations will go, but whether anything will replace them

Let Them Drink Pollution?

Article | Jan 26, 2016

The tragic crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents have been poisoned by lead contamination, is not just about drinking water. And it’s not just about Flint. It’s about race and class, and the stark contradiction between the American dream of equal rights and opportunity for all and the American nightmare of metastasizing inequality of wealth and power.

Three Measures of Environmental Inequality

Paper Working Paper Series | | Apr 2014

Using data on industrial air pollution exposure in the United States, we compute three measures of environmental inequality: the Gini coefficient of exposure, the ratio of median exposure of minorities to that of non-Hispanic whites, and the ratio of median exposure of poor households to that of nonpoor households.

Featuring this expert

Reawakening

From the Origins of Economic Ideas to the Challenges of Our Time

Event Plenary | Oct 21–23, 2017

INET gathered hundreds of new economic thinkers in Edinburgh to discuss the past, present, and future of the economics profession.