Matthew Kahn

Matthew E. Kahn (born 1966) is a leading American educator in the field of environmental economics. Since 2016, he has been a professor of economics at the University of Southern California. He attended Scarsdale High School and then graduated from Hamilton College and the London School of Economics. After earning his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, he began teaching at various universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and Tufts and UCLA.

He is a Research Associate at the NBER and the IZA. Kahn has published many papers and has authored five books including; Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment (Brookings Institution Press, 2006) and (with Dora Costa) Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War, which was published late in 2008 by Princeton University Press. In 2010, Basic Books published his book on climate change adaptation and cities titled; "Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter World. In July 2013, he published a free markets environmental textbook that can be purchased for $1 a copy on Amazon called Fundamentals of Environmental and Urban Economics. In May 2016, Princeton University Press published his book Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China . This book is co-authored with Professor Siqi Zheng of Tsinghua University in China.

Kahn's research focuses on the environmental, urban, real estate and energy economics. He is also known for his work on social capital. He blogs on these topics at greeneconomics.blogspot.com. In 2009, the Wall Street Journal named him one of the top 25 Economics bloggers. He is married to Dora L. Costa. Professor Costa is an economic historian and demographer who teaches at UCLA.