Catherine Wolfram

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Catherine Wolfram

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Catherine Wolfram is the William F. Pounds Professor of Energy Economics 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.

Publications

"Design and Implementation of the Price Cap on Russian Oil Export."

Johnson, Simon, Lukasz Rachel, and Catherine Wolfram. Journal of Comparative Economics. Forthcoming.

"Digital Collateral."

Gertler, Paul, Brett Green, and Catherine Wolfram. Quarterly Journal of Economics. Forthcoming.

"The ’90s Are Over: 5 Reasons to Embrace Carbon Pricing Today."

Clausing, Kimberly and Catherine Wolfram. The Hill, March 26, 2024.

"Climate Tax Policy Reform Options in 2025."

John Bistline, Kimberly Clausing, Neil Mehrotra, James Stock, and Catherine Wolfram. In The Hamilton Project, Washington, D.C.: February 2024.

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