Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy

Rigorous, careful, and nonpartisan research with a high policy impact on environmental and energy economics.

Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy focuses on the effective and efficient management of environmental and energy challenges. Research papers offer new evidence on the intended and unintended consequences, the market and nonmarket effects, and the incentive and distributional impacts of policy initiatives and market developments.

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy. James Bushnell and Aaron Smith illustrate a new way of modeling uncertainty for the purpose of understanding climate policy effects in the US electricity sector. Xinming Du, Muye Ru, and Douglas Almond estimate the effect of a federal requirement for oil and gas firms to detect and repair methane leaks, showing that the removal of the regulation in 2020 prompted an increase in emissions. Ivan Rudik, Derek Lemoine, and Antonia Marcheva explore equity and efficiency tradeoffs in climate adaptation funding as part of the 2021 US Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. John Bistline, Kimberly A. Clausing, Neil R. Mehrotra, James H. Stock, and Catherine Wolfram outline a range of different US climate policy options for near-term implementation. Frances C. Moore considers the potential economic consequences of accounting for non-stationarity in the distribution of weather because of climate change. Finally, Ben Groom and Frank Venmans discuss different ways of quantifying the social value of temporary reductions in atmospheric carbon, with implications for carbon offset markets.

Matthew J. Kotchen is a Professor of Economics at Yale University, with a primary appointment in the Yale School of the Environment and secondary appointments in the Yale School of Management and the Department of Economics. 

Tatyana Deryugina is an associate professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a research associate of the NBER. Her research has been published in such journals as the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.

Catherine D. Wolfram is the William F. Pounds Professor of Energy Economics at MIT Sloan School of Management and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.