About

Antony Millner is an Associate Professor of Economics and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research focuses on Environmental Economics, Political Economy, and Behavioral Economics. As a member of the Consortium for Applied Research in Economics, he contributes to the department's research initiatives in these areas, emphasizing the intersection of economic behavior and environmental policy.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Political Science
• Microeconomics
• Natural resource economics
• Market economy
• Environmental resource management
• Mathematics
• Finance
• Environmental science
• Business
• Positive economics
• Statistics
• Ecology
• Public economics
• Biology
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• Ambiguity and the Language of Long Run Risk

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Long Run Cost Benefit Rules

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-12-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper investigates a duality between ambiguity averse preferences and the valuation of long run risky assets or public projects.The variational ambiguity model represents preferences over ambiguous acts via a minimization problem, and is fundamentally nonprobabilistic.In contrast, long run risky assets are ranked via a large maturity limit of expected discounted returns.Despite their apparent differences, we show that each variational ambiguity preference is a long run risk preference, and (under natural conditions) vice versa.We explore three implications: a notion of long run stochastic dominance that resolves differences between stochastic processes considered identical by standard risk measures, a typology of stochastic processes that pinpoints when a nonprobabilistic description of long run risk is required, and an evolutionary foundation for variational ambiguity preferences that offers a novel explanation for ambiguity aversion.

  PublisherDOI

• Accounting for the increasing benefits from scarce ecosystems

  Science · 2024 · 64 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Natural resource economics

  As people get richer, and ecosystem services scarcer, policy-relevant estimates of ecosystem value must rise.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Choosing the Future: Markets, Ethics, and Rapprochement in Social Discounting

  Journal of Economic Literature · 2023-09-01 · 17 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper provides a critical review of the literature on choosing social discount rates (SDRs) for public cost-benefit analysis. We discuss two dominant approaches, the first based on market prices and the second based on intertemporal ethics. While both methods have attractive features, neither is immune to criticism. The market-based approach is not entirely persuasive even if markets are perfect, and faces further headwinds once the implications of market imperfections are recognised. By contrast, the ‘ethical’ approach—which relates SDRs to marginal rates of substitution implicit in a single planner’s intertemporal welfare function—does not rely exclusively on markets, but raises difficult questions about what that welfare function should be. There is considerable disagreement on this matter, which translates into enormous variation in the evaluation of long-run payoffs. We discuss the origins of these disagreements, and suggest that they are difficult to resolve unequivocally. This leads us to propose a third approach that recognises the immutable nature of some normative disagreements, and proposes methods for aggregating diverse theories of intertemporal social welfare. We illustrate the application of these methods to social discounting, and suggest that they may help us to move beyond long-standing debates that have bedevilled this field. (JEL D60, D61, D71, H43, H54)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: Non-dogmatic Climate Policy

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-01-26

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  The replication files to reproduce and verify the numerical results in "Non-dogmatic Climate Policy" by Niko Jaakkola and Antony Millner, accepted at JAERE.

  PublisherDOI

• Choosing the Future: Markets, Ethics, and Rapprochement in Social Discounting

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Choosing the Future: Markets, Ethics, and Rapprochement in Social Discounting

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2021-04-01 · 8 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper provides a critical review of the literature on choosing social discount rates (SDRs) for public cost-benefit analysis. We discuss two dominant approaches, the first based on market prices, and the second based on intertemporal ethics. While both methods have attractive features, neither is immune to criticism. The market-based approach is not entirely persuasive even if markets are perfect, and faces further headwinds once the implications of market imperfections are recognised. By contrast, the 'ethical' approach -which relates SDRs to marginal rates of substitution implicit in a single planner's intertemporal welfare function -does not rely exclusively on markets, but raises difficult questions about what that welfare function should be. There is considerable disagreement on this matter, which translates into enormous variation in the evaluation of long-run payoffs. We discuss the origins of these disagreements, and suggest that they are difficult to resolve unequivocally. This leads us to propose a third approach that recognises the immutable nature of some normative disagreements, and proposes methods for aggregating diverse theories of intertemporal social welfare. We illustrate the application of these methods to social discounting, and suggest that they may help us to move beyond long-standing debates that have bedevilled this field.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Prediction: The Long and the Short of It

  American Economic Journal Microeconomics · 2021 · 18 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Econometrics

  Commentators often lament forecasters’ inability to provide precise predictions of the long-run behavior of complex economic and physical systems. Yet their concerns often conflate the presence of substantial long-run uncertainty with the need for long-run predictability; short-run predictions can partially substitute for long-run predictions if decision-makers can adjust their activities over time. So what is the relative importance of short- and long-run predictability? We study this question in a model of rational dynamic adjustment to a changing environment. Even if adjustment costs, discount factors, and long-run uncertainty are large, short-run predictability can be much more important than long-run predictability. (JEL D21, D81, D83)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Confirmation bias and signaling in Downsian elections

  Journal of Public Economics · 2020-04-16 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Nondogmatic Climate Policy

  Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Geoffrey Heal

  Columbia University

  44 shared

• Hélène Ollivier

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  12 shared

• Simon Dietz

  10 shared

• Leo K. Simon

  8 shared

• Terry P. Hughes

  Australian Research Council

  5 shared

• Victor Galaz

  4 shared

• Niko Jaakkola

  University of Bologna

  4 shared

• Thomas K. J. McDermott

  Ollscoil na Gaillimhe – University of Galway

  4 shared