Energy and environmental economics, public policy, natural hazards and terrorism, regional science, applied general equilibrium modeling
Adam Rose is a Research Professor in the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy, and Director Emeritus, Senior Research Fellow of USC’s Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Threats and Emergencies (CREATE). Previously, he held faculty and department chair positions in applied economics departments at The Pennsylvania State University and West Virginia University, as well as a faculty positon at the University of California, Riverside. He received his PhD in economics from Cornell University, but has worked on interdisciplinary topics throughout most of his career.
Professor Rose’s primary research interest is the economics of disasters. He has spearheaded the development of CREATE’s comprehensive economic consequence analysis framework and has done pioneering research on resilience at the level of the individual business/household, market/industry and regional/national economy. He has also completed dozens of case studies of disaster consequences, resilience and recovery, including the September 11 terrorist attacks. He is currently the PI on an NSF grant on advanced computational methods to improve reliability and resilience of interdependent systems and a contract with the Critical infrastructure Institute to measure static economic resilience. He recently headed a study for FEMA that analyzed a deductible/credit system for its Public Assistance Program. He also recently served as an advisor to the United Nations Development Programme on disaster resilience and to the World Bank on financing disaster risk management.
His other major research area is the economics of energy and climate change policy. As a consultant to the United Nations, he played a major role in the development of the first proposal for a system of globally tradable emission allowances, presented at the Rio Earth Summit. More recently, he has advised government agencies in several U.S. states and regions on the development of cap & trade programs and has advised several states and Baja California, Mexico on the employment impacts of climate action plans. He is currently a Co-PI on a subcontract to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to evaluate the regional economic impacts of the City of Los Angeles transitioning to an all renewable electricity service capability. Professor Rose has done pioneering research on the aggregate and distributional impacts of climate mitigation policy by advancing methodologies in both computable general equilibrium and macroeconometric modeling. He has also evaluated the economic impacts of twenty major energy technologies, including both fossil fuels and renewables.
Professor Rose is the author of several books and 250 professional papers, including most recently Defining and Measuring Economic Resilience from a Societal, Environmental and Security Perspective (Springer), Economic Consequence Analysis Tool (Springer), and The Economics of Climate Change Policy (Elgar). He has been appointed to the editorial boards of Economics of Natural Disasters and Climate Change, Environmental Hazards, Journal of Integrated Disaster Risk Management, International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, The Energy Journal, Resource and Energy Economics, Energy Policy, Pacific and Asian Journal of Energy, Journal of Sustainable Energy Engineering, Resource Policy, and Journal of Regional Science.
Professor Rose has served as the American Economic Association Representative to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Institute of Building Sciences Multi-Hazard Mitigation Council and of the Advisory Board of the Center for National Policy Resilience Forum. He was recently elected President of the International Society for Integrated Risk Management (IDRiM) and served for many years on its Board of Directors. He is the recipient of the IDRiM Distinguished Research Award, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, East-West Center Fellowship, American Planning Association Outstanding Program Planning Honor Award, Applied Technology Council Outstanding Achievement Award, Regional Economic Models Outstanding Economic Analysis Award, DHS/CREATE Transition Product of the Year Award, Sir Richard Stone Best Paper Prize, and Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis Outstanding Article Award. He was recently elected a Fellow of the Regional Science Association.
