A team of researchers who partnered with government regulators to design and rigorously evaluate the world’s first particulate matter emissions market has won the UC Berkeley Haas Sustainable Business Research Prize for 2025-2026.

The winning paper, “Can Pollution Markets Work in Developing Countries? Experimental Evidence from India,” authored by Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago; Rohini Pande and Nicholas Ryan of Yale University; and Anant Sudarshan of the University of Warwick, was awarded $10,000 as the top prize from the award’s total $20,000 pool. (Read a summary of the paper here.)

The biannual UC Berkeley Haas Sustainable Business Research Prize is administered by the Berkeley Haas Center for Responsible Business (CRB) and was established with the generous support of Allan Spivack, MBA 79, to bridge the gap between academia and practice by recognizing research that offers promising, real-world solutions for advancing sustainable business.

The winning paper evaluates a randomized controlled trial conducted in partnership with the Gujarat Pollution Control Board that tested a cap-and-trade system for particulate matter emissions in Surat, India. The researchers found that the emissions market reduced pollution by 20% to 30% while lowering abatement costs by 11%, providing rare experimental evidence that market-based environmental regulation can succeed even in low- and middle-income countries with constrained regulatory capacity.