Faculty
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.
Featured Publication
"Strengthening Enforcement of the Russian Oil Price Cap."Johnson, Simon and Catherine Wolfram. Brookings Institution Working Paper (2024). Appendix.
Featured Publication
"Carbon Border Adjustments, Climate Clubs, and Subsidy Races When Climate Policies Vary."Clausing, Kimberly and Catherine Wolfram. Journal of Economic Perspectives Vol. 37, No. 3 (2023): 137-162. Download Working Paper.
Gertler, Paul, Brett Green, and Catherine Wolfram. Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 139, No. 3 (2024): 1713-1766.
Clausing, Kimberly and Catherine Wolfram. The Hill, March 26, 2024.
Susanna Berkouwer, Pierre Biscaye, Maya Mikdash, Steven Puller, and Catherine Wolfram. In Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA: March 2024.
Clausing, Kimberly, Peter Cramton, Axel Ockenfels, and Catherine Wolfram. Intereconomics Vol. 59, No. 1 (2024): 55-56.
In new report, an international group of researchers propose a path for countries willing to align carbon pricing, avert trade frictions, and unlock $200 billion in annual revenues
Climate economist Catherine Wolfram explains how the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism aims to level the playing field among trading partners.
"China has pretty clearly decided that that's where the world is going and has invested heavily in electric vehicles," said professor Catherine Wolfram. "Outright competition might not be in the best interest of the U.S., because we are so far behind. Maybe some kind of joint ventures or more cooperative approaches will make sense in the future."
Referring to a proposed climate coalition, professor Catherine Wolfram said: "The findings suggest that there are huge impacts on emissions. Relative to the current policy the coalition could achieve seven times more emission reduction. And in fact, in some high-income countries, the production in these sectors would go up compared to the baseline scenario."
The landscape of international climate co-operation is shifting in response to the disengagement of the world's most powerful economy. "The US withdrawal has put in very stark relief that we've got to find ways to move forward that don't involve that kind of unanimity," professor Catherine Wolfram said. "I do think that there's something to be said for getting a small group of finance ministries together and making progress without 190-odd voices in that conversation."
"There's definitely a need to increase the ambition of the carbon pricing programs that are out there," said professor Catherine Wolfram. She is on a council of economists supporting the COP30 president ahead of the November climate conference in Belem, Brazil.
