I'm an environmental economist and an assistant professor at the Department of Economics, National University of Singapore.
My research examines how environmental stressors and regulations affect local socioeconomic outcomes, as well as nonlocal outcomes through trade linkages, air or ocean flow, social media networks, and transportation infrastructure. I also study greenwashing efforts and methane leakage from fossil fuel operations.
I received my Ph.D. from the Sustainable Development program at Columbia University in 2023.
Email: xd2197@columbia.edu xdu@nus.edu.sg
Upcoming trips/talks:
NBER EEE: March 27-28, Cambridge MA
I will visit the Salata Institute at Harvard University in Fall 2025.
Working papers:
Trade, Trees, and Lives (with Lei Li and Eric Zou)
NBER WP #33143, SSRN November 2024 version
NBER WP #33094, SSRN October 2024 version
Columbia CEEP WP #24, CESifo WP #10296
Reject and Resubmit at Economic Journal
R&R at Journal of Public Economics
Columbia CEEP WP #26, May 2022 version, August 2020 version
R&R at Economic Journal
Green Regulation, Trade Friendliness, and Local Policy Adaptation (with Yu Qin and Yu Xie)
R&R at Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
Publications:
Xinming Du, Muye Ru, Douglas Almond (forthcoming). Rapid Increases in Methane Concentrations Following August 2020 Suspension of the US Methane Rule. NBER Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy: Cambridge University Press.
Douglas Almond, Xinming Du, Anna Papp (2022). Favourability towards Natural Gas Relates to Funding Source of University Energy Centres. Nature Climate Change, 12: 1122–1128.
Douglas Almond, Xinming Du (2020). Later Bedtimes Predict President Trump’s Performance. Economics Letters, 197: 109590.
Douglas Almond, Xinming Du, Valerie Karplus, Shuang Zhang (2021). Ambiguous Air Pollution Effects of China's COVID-19 Lock-Down. AEA Papers and Proceedings, 111: 376-80.
Xinming Du (2023). Competing with Clean Air: Pollution Disclosure and College Desirability. Ecological Economics, 204: 107631.
Douglas Almond, Xinming Du, Alana Vogel (2022). Reduced Trolling on Russian Holidays and Daily US Presidential Election Odds. PLOS ONE, 17(3): e0264507.
Junjie Zhang, Zhenxuan Wang, Xinming Du (2017). Lessons Learned from China's Regional Carbon Market Pilots. Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy, 0(2).
Teaching:
Schedule an appointment: https://calendly.com/xd2197/office-hours
EC2383 Environmental Economics: Syllabus
EC4305 Applied Econometrics (co-teach with Hsin-Tien Tiffany Tsai): Syllabus
Selected Media Coverage:
Exposure to microplastics lowers birthweights and damages infant health, VoxDev (January 2025)
Podcast on social media and violence, with Jennifer Doleac, Probable Causation (December 2023)
Biden has a profound choice to make on LNG expansion, by Bill McKibben, The New Yorker (October 2023)
Fossil fuel companies donated $700m to US universities over 10 years, by Amy Westervelt, The Guardian (March 2023)
How oil & gas funding distorts energy research, Yahoo News (November 2022)
Trump’s sleepless nights, trustworthy faces, and importing hate, Boston Globe (October 2020)
``Economics is the study of the optimal allocation of scarce resources. Climate stability and survivable environment are increasingly scarce resources.''