Geoffrey Heal is Paul Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Corporate responsibility and Professor of Finance and Economics at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University, and Director of Columbia Earth Institute’s Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development, having taught previously at Cambridge as a Fellow of Christ’s College, Sussex, Essex, Paris, Stockholm, Yale, Stanford and Princeton.
He is a Director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, and of the Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and was a Commissioner of the Pew Oceans Commission and a member of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board Committee on the Valuing the Preservation of Ecosystem Services.
Having studied physics and economics at Cambridge University (first class honors BA and a doctorate), he was Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies and has published over one hundred articles and fifteen books including Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources, Public Policy and the Tax System, The Evolving International Economy, Oil and the International Economy, Topological Social Choice, The Economics of Increasing Returns, Environmental Markets, and Valuing the Future and Nature and the Marketplace.
He has acted as a Consultant to the British and American governments, to the World Bank and other international agencies, and to trade unions and major corporations. His current research interests reach from financial markets, where he studies the role of derivatives and the securitization of catastrophic risks, to environmental conservation, where he studies the use of market-based incentives for conservation of forests and biodiversity.
