Catherine Wolfram is the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
She previously served as the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
From March 2021 to October 2022, she served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate and Energy Economics at the U.S. Treasury, while on leave from UC Berkeley.
Before leaving for government service, she was the Program Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Environment and Energy Economics Program and a research affiliate at the Energy Institute at Haas. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard.
Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. Her work has analyzed rural electrification programs in the developing world, energy efficiency programs in the US, the effects of environmental regulation on energy markets and the impact of privatization and restructuring in the US and UK. She is currently working on several projects at the intersection of climate, energy, and trade, including work on the impact of the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) on Mozambique, policy spillovers from the EU CBAM, border adjustments for methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, and the price cap on Russian oil.
She received a PhD in Economics from MIT in 1996 and an AB from Harvard in 1989.
Catherine Wolfram, a leading energy economist who has researched the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act, shares her views of the impact of the IRA, its likely fate, and the energy policies of the incoming Trump Administration. Wolfram served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate and Energy Economics at the US Treasury in 2021-2022
While the carbon tax has received a lot of negative publicity in the United States over the decades, more and more countries have been implementing carbon pricing schemes of their own. It raises the question, could carbon pricing be the cost of decarbonization? Economist Catherine Wolfram delves into economic policy and the many creative economic incentives to reduce carbon emissions, gives us a look at where things currently stand in the United States and abroad, and explores whether American carbon pricing might soon be feasible.