Faculty
Christopher Knittel is the Associate Dean for Climate and Sustainability, the George P. Shultz Professor and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Prior to MIT Sloan, Knittel taught at the University of California, Davis, and at Boston University. His research focuses on industrial organization, environmental economics, and applied econometrics.
Knittel is an associate editor of The American Economic Journal— Economic Policy, The Journal of Industrial Economics, and the Journal of Energy Markets. His research has appeared in The American Economic Review, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Journal of Industrial Economics, The Energy Journal, and other academic journals. He also is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Productivity, Industrial Organization, and Energy and Environmental Economics groups.
Knittel holds a BA in economics and political science from California State University, Stanislaus; an MA in economics from the University of California, Davis; and a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
http://knittel.world
Senga, Juan Ramon L., Audun Botterud, John E. Parsons, S. Drew Story, and Christopher R. Knittel. Nature Energy. Forthcoming.
Clausing, Kimberly A., Christopher R. Knittel, and Catherine Wolfram. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Forthcoming.
Espiritu Argosino, Fischer J. and Christopher R. Knittel, Working Paper. December 2025.
Knittel, Christopher R., and Samuel Stolper. The Economic Journal Vol. 135, No. 672 (2025): 2377-2401. NBER Working Paper.
Knittel, Christopher R., Juan Ramon L. Senga, and Shen Wang, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7348-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, July 2025. NBER Working Paper No. 34065.
Knittel, Christopher R., Gilbert E. Metcalf, and Shereein Saraf, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7349-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, June 2025. NBER Working Paper No. 33894.
Data centers that shift workload to different times of day save money, but the environmental impact depends on the local grid.
Climate policy expert Christopher Knittel handicaps the likelihood of tariffs, cuts to IRA subsidies, and a carbon tax under the new administration.
Global oil futures surged the most in four years Monday, rising as much as 14%. The price of crude accounts for about half of how much motorists pay at the pump. And when oil rises quickly, gasoline prices tend to follow suit. "It's the rockets and feathers effect," said professor Christopher Knittel, associate dean for climate and sustainability. "When things are going up — they go up fast."
While burying power lines everywhere isn't feasible, there are still some places where the effort would be worth it, according to associate dean for climate and sustainability Christopher Knittel. " We don't have to necessarily move to a system where everything is underground," he said. "What we really need is a more targeted approach, which is to identify the most critical lines in the network and do the cost-benefit test on undergrounding those."
In a recent paper, associate dean for climate and sustainability Christopher Knittel, professor Catherine Wolfram, and co-author estimated that Americans are paying between $400 and $900 per person annually because of global warming. "We're likely at this inflection point where costs are going to start growing more rapidly," Knittel said. "The observed costs have been fairly linear so far. Going forward, that's going to start increasing at an increasing rate."
The costs of utility investments could add up quickly, said associate dean for climate and sustainability Christopher Knittel. "If it's just a few industrial customers with behind-the-meter power plants, it doesn't really matter," he said. But as data centers grow bigger and more plentiful, he added, "these things are going to matter so much."
