Thomas Mcdermott

Biography

Thomas joined the School of Economics at University College Cork, Ireland in January 2015. Prior to that I was a research officer at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, where I am now a visiting fellow. Thomas research is at the intersection of environmental and development economics. He is a co-editor of (Edward Elgar, 2016). I am also Principal Investigator for a project funded by the Environmental Protection Agency on , and options for managing flood risk, including an emphasis on the role of insurance. Thomas holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), where I was supervised by Frank Barry and Richard Tol. During the Summer of 2012 I was a PhD research intern at the United Nations University, World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) in Helsinki. He hold a B.Comm (International - with Italian) and an M.Sc. in Economics from the National University of Ireland, Galway and previously taught economics at Dublin City University.

Research Interest

Thomas research is on a range of topics related to the economics of climate adaptation and development. He has published papers on the economic components of climate-economy models (in the journal ), on the economic impacts of natural disasters (in ) and on adaptation to climate change (in – the top ranking social-science journal on the environment - and in ). His book on (co-edited with Sam Fankhauser, Grantham Research Institute, LSE) was published by Edward Elgar in July 2016. He recently contributed a chapter on adaptation under uncertain climate change to a World Bank project on the economic benefits of disaster risk management (published as part of the World Bank's Policy Research Working Paper series). His latest research project – in collaboration with colleagues from LSE and Oxford – estimates the local economic impact of large-scale urban flooding events using spatially refined data for a global sample. The results of this research were presented at the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists annual conference in Helsinki (June 2015) and the Regional Science Association International, British & Irish Section in Dublin (August, 2015), and the paper is currently under review at the