Center for Energy and the Economy working papers
Working papers offering insights on expanding and deepening our collective understanding energy markets and how they inform monetary policy and impact the U.S. economy.
Working Papers
Smooth Operator? Managing Electric Vehicle Integration in Constrained Distribution Networks
This paper examines the underappreciated challenges that electric vehicle (EV) adoption poses for the distribution grid.
December 22, 2025
Working Papers
Pollution Taxes and Clean Subsidies in an Open Economy
This paper shows that the same conditions that lead to pollution leakage enhance the efficacy of clean subsidies.
August 18, 2025
Working Papers
Time-Limited Subsidies: Optimal Taxation with Implications for Renewable Energy Subsidies
Pigouvian subsidies are efficient, but output subsidies with uncertain or limited durations are not Pigouvian. This paper shows that optimal “time-limited” policies must also subsidize investment to correct externalities generated after the output subsidy ends.
August 05, 2025
Working Papers
The Effects of Competition in the Retail Gasoline Industry
This paper estimates the effect of competition on incumbent firm pricing by using high frequency price data and the precise geographic location for all gas stations in California.
March 05, 2025
Working Papers
What Fuels the Volatility of Electricity Prices?
This paper uses emergency outages of coal generators as an exogenous source of variation in the power generation stack to study how changes in marginal fuel affect real-time prices. Contrary to anecdotal evidence, the authors find that wholesale prices are less volatile when natural gas is on the margin more often.
October 15, 2024
Working Papers
Do Bill Shocks Induce Energy Efficiency Investments?
This paper studies whether electricity bill shocks draw attention to the benefits of home energy efficiency investments.
September 20, 2024
Working Papers
Geopolitical Oil Price Risk and Economic Fluctuations
This paper studies the general equilibrium effects of time-varying geopolitical risk in the oil market by simultaneously modeling downside risk from disasters, oil storage and the endogenous determination of oil price and macroeconomic uncertainty in the global economy.
May 28, 2024
Working Papers
The Impact of the 2022 Oil Embargo and Price Cap on Russian Oil Prices
This paper documents the effect of the oil embargo and price cap on Russian oil exports in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
March 26, 2024
Investing in the Batteries and Vehicles of the Future: A View Through the Stock Market
A large number of companies operating in the EV and battery supply chain have listed on a U.S. stock exchange in recent years. This paper compiles a unique data set of high-frequency stock returns for those companies and investigates the extent to which an “industry” factor specific to the EV and battery supply chain (an “EV” factor) can explain their returns.
March 25, 2024
Working Papers
Oil Price Shocks and Inflation
Despite growing interest in the impact of oil and other energy price shocks on inflation and inflation expectations, until recently this question has not received much attention. This survey not only presents empirical results for the U.S. economy, but expands the analysis to include other major economies.
August 24, 2023