Antonio Bento

Associate Professor

Areas of Expertise

Environmental Economics, Energy Economics, Urban Economics, Public Economics

424 Warren Hall
Ph: 607.255.0626
E-mail: amb396@cornell.edu
Biofuels Project

Antonio M. Bento is an associate professor in Cornell’s Department of Applied Economics and Management. Bento graduated from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, with a B.A. in economics in 1996 and earned a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of Maryland in 2000. Prior to joining Cornell, he was a faculty member at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Sciences and Management and the Department of Economics at the University of California-Santa Barbara and, more recently, at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. He has also been a consultant to the research division of the World Bank.

Most of Professor Bento’s research lies at the boundaries of environmental, energy, urban, and public economics, and uses state-of-the-art econometric and computable general equilibrium methods, as well as geographical information (GIS) tools.

Over the past few years, Professor Bento has worked on a variety of topics including:

•	Environmental tax reform and the “double-dividend” hypothesis
•	Costs and distributional impacts of reducing gasoline consumption and carbon emissions from the transportation sector
•	Effectiveness of major U.S. environmental legislation (e.g., the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, the RECLAIM program)
•	Urban environmental problems in less-developed countries (e.g., slums in India and motorization in China)
•	Urban sprawl and land use change in the U.S.

Currently, Professor Bento is launching a research agenda on the economics of biofuels that aims to evaluate the costs and environmental consequences of federal and state ethanol subsidies.

Professor Bento’s research has appeared in numerous journals and books, including the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and Journal of Urban Economics.

Teaching

AEM 6940: Biofuels–The Economic and Environmental Interaction

Selected Publications

Bento, Antonio, Charles Towe, and Jackie Geoghegan. December 2007. The Effects of Moratoria on Residential Development: Evidence from a Matching Approach. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 89(5).

Bento, Antonio, Mark Jacobsen. January 2007. Ricardian Rents, Environmental Policy, and the "Double Dividend" Hypothesis. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 53(1).

Bento, Antonio, Sofia Franco, and Daniel Kaffine. January 2006. The Efficiency and Distributional Impacts of Anti-Sprawl Policies. Journal of Urban Economics 59(1).

Bento, Antonio, Maureen Cropper, Mushfiq Moborak, and Katja Vinha. August 2005. The Impact of Urban Spatial Structure on Travel Demand in the United States. Review of Economics and Statistics 87(3).

Bento, Antonio, Lawrence Goulder, Emeric Henry, Mark Jacobsen, and Roger Von-Haefen. May 2005. Distributional and Efficiency Impacts of Gasoline Taxes: An Econometrically-based Multi-market Study. American Economic Review 95(2).

Education

Ph.D., University of Maryland, 2000
B.A., Universidade Nova de LIsboa, Portugal, 1996

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