Faculty
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James BushnellCo-Director, DEEP
Professor, Department of Economics |
Energy Areas
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James Bushnell is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining UC Davis, he spent 15 years as the Research Director of the University of California Energy Institute in Berkeley, and two years as the Cargill Chair in Energy Economics and Director of the Biobased Industry Center at Iowa State University. Prof. Bushnell received a Ph.D. in Operations Research from U.C. Berkeley in 1993. He has written extensively on the regulation, organization, and competitiveness of energy markets. His research on restructured electricity markets has appeared in leading economics journals such as the American Economic Review and RAND journal of economics.
Prof. Bushnell has been actively involved in energy and environmental policy for over a decade. During 1999 and 2000, he served as a member of the Market Monitoring Committee (MMC) of the California Power Exchange. Since 2002, he has served as a member of the Market Surveillance Committee (MSC) of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). Both the MMC and MSC were establish to provide external monitoring and analysis to complement the internal market monitoring functions at the PX and CAISO, respectively. Prof. Bushnell has also served as a member of the Economic Analysis and Allocation Committee (EAAC) and Market Simulation Group (MSG) of the California Air Resources Board. Both groups were charged with analyzing California’s emissions market for greenhouse gasses and advising the ARB on the markets design and performance.
Prof. Bushnell has been actively involved in energy and environmental policy for over a decade. During 1999 and 2000, he served as a member of the Market Monitoring Committee (MMC) of the California Power Exchange. Since 2002, he has served as a member of the Market Surveillance Committee (MSC) of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). Both the MMC and MSC were establish to provide external monitoring and analysis to complement the internal market monitoring functions at the PX and CAISO, respectively. Prof. Bushnell has also served as a member of the Economic Analysis and Allocation Committee (EAAC) and Market Simulation Group (MSG) of the California Air Resources Board. Both groups were charged with analyzing California’s emissions market for greenhouse gasses and advising the ARB on the markets design and performance.
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David RapsonCo-Director, DEEP
Professor, Department of Economics |
Energy Areas:
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David Rapson is a Chancellor’s Leadership Professor in the UC Davis Economics Department and Policy Advisor & Senior Research Economist at the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. The central objective of Professor Rapson’s work is to understand and demonstrate how consumers and firms respond to incentives, and what this implies for effective energy, environmental and economic policy. His work examines a central tension of the energy transition. On one hand, government intervention can improve outcomes when markets fail and when government policies set correct incentives; on the other hand, poorly conceived government interventions may create incentives that undermine goals that they are trying to achieve. Professor Rapson’s research seeks to understand the difference to discern which policies will be effective.
At the moment, Professor Rapson’s research primarily focuses on the transportation sector, where decarbonization is challenging due to the centrality of fossil fuels as the main energy input. He is an expert on electric vehicles, energy markets, climate policy and regulation. His research appears in the American Economic Review, Science, Nature, and other academic journals. Dr. Rapson has held various posts in service to the profession and the community. He is currently Treasurer of the US Association of Energy Economists and is on the Editorial Council of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics. From 2015-2019 he was Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. He earned degrees from Dartmouth College (AB), Queen’s University (MA) and Boston University (PhD).
At the moment, Professor Rapson’s research primarily focuses on the transportation sector, where decarbonization is challenging due to the centrality of fossil fuels as the main energy input. He is an expert on electric vehicles, energy markets, climate policy and regulation. His research appears in the American Economic Review, Science, Nature, and other academic journals. Dr. Rapson has held various posts in service to the profession and the community. He is currently Treasurer of the US Association of Energy Economists and is on the Editorial Council of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics. From 2015-2019 he was Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. He earned degrees from Dartmouth College (AB), Queen’s University (MA) and Boston University (PhD).
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Aaron Smith
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Aaron Smith is the DeLoach Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis, where he has been since 2001. Originally from New Zealand, he earned his PhD in Economics from the University of California, San Diego. His research addresses policy, trading, and price dynamics in agricultural, energy, and financial markets. Recent project topics include estimating the effects of ethanol production on agricultural and energy markets, evaluating building energy efficiency policies, and the effects of cropland agriculture on water pollution. His research has been published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Econometrics, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and other academic journals. He is the cluster lead for socioeconomics and ethics in the AI Institute for the Food System (AIFS) and a co-director of the Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research (CeDAR).
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Mark Agerton
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Mark Agerton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis. He works on issues in energy and resource economics, with a special focus on dynamic investment problems. His current research examines several aspects of the U.S. shale boom, including how firms learn where to drill, the economics of mineral leasing, constraints in midstream infrastructure, and market structure in oilfield services. Agerton earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Rice University, an M.A. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a B.A. in Spanish from Davidson College.
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Jamie Hansen-LewisAssistant Professor
Agricultural and Resource Economics |
Energy Areas
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Jamie Hansen-Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis. In her research, she focuses on using tools from the natural sciences to measure the economic consequences of air pollution. In ongoing projects, she quantifies the effectiveness and distributional equity of maritime fuel emissions standards and she examines how air pollution affects manufacturing productivity in India. She received a BA in economics from Swarthmore College in 2010 and a PhD in economics from Brown University in 2019.
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Katrina JessoeProfessor
Agricultural and Resource Economics |
Energy Areas
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Katrina Jessoe is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis, where she specializes in environmental and energy economics. Much of her research centers on the design and evaluation of pricing and conservation polices in the water and electricity sectors. In her research, she often collaborates with electric and water utilities, as well as state agencies. Some recent and ongoing projects include a framed field experiment to understand the water and energy impacts of water conservation instruments, the estimation of the price elasticity of demand for agricultural groundwater and land use, rate design and regulation in urban water utilities, and a RCT to understand the effects of default options in commercial energy efficiency. She received a BA from Princeton University in 2002 and a PhD in Environmental and Resource Economics from Yale University in 2009
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Frances MooreAssociate Professor
Environmental Science & Policy |
Energy Areas:
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Frances C. Moore is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, working at the intersection of environmental economics and climate science. Her research seeks to improve our understanding of the economic and social impacts of climate change and to better understand our ability to adapt to those impacts. To do this she combine econometric analysis, experimental approaches, climate model output, and economic modeling. Her work contributes to estimates of the aggregate costs of climate change, including the social cost of carbon. Her work has been published in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Climate Change and the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. She holds a BA, summa cum laude, in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University, a Masters in Environmental Science from the Yale School of the Environment, a Masters in Economics from Stanford University and a Ph.D in Environment and Resources from Stanford University.
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Erich MuehleggerProfessor
Department of Economics |
Energy Areas:
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Erich Muehlegger is a Professor in the economics department at UC-Davis and a faculty research fellow at the NBER. Formerly, he was on the faculty at Harvard Kennedy School, a fellow of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and former faculty chair of the Regulatory Policy Program. His research interests include industrial organization, public finance and environmental policy, especially in the context of the energy and transportation sectors. His research focuses on how regulatory policy can be used to affect the decisions of firms and consumers and, in particular, how insights can be used to design better regulations and incentives. One line of research examines how a broad array of environmental policies, from fuel taxes to hybrid vehicle incentives to fuel content regulations, affect the behavior of producers and the decision of consumers. Examples of his work in this area include an examination of how drivers change driving behavior and vehicle purchase decision in response to changes in state gasoline taxes, a comparison of the efficacy of different hybrid vehicle incentives and a paper that models how refineries respond to changing environmental regulations. A second set of projects estimate counterproductive effects of regulation and energy taxes, including a paper that studies the effect of federal regulatory innovation on diesel fuel tax evasion. His work has been published in top academic journals and covered by the popular press, television and radio. He received his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005.
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Kevin NovanAssociate Professor
Agricultural and Resource Economics |
Energy Areas:
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Kevin Novan joined the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at UC Davis in 2012. His research interests are in the fields of energy and environmental economics, focusing primarily on questions surrounding the design and implementation of policies targeted towards the electricity sector. Recent work quantifies the impact of renewable electricity on pollution, examines the social costs and benefits of storing electricity, and evaluates the energy and pollution savings provided by residential energy efficiency investments. He holds a B.A. in economics and mathematics from Western Washington University and a Ph.D. in economics from UC San Diego.
