Energy Job Market Papers 2025 - The Complete List
Where new researchers are looking
This post contains a complete list of energy-related job market papers that we’ve identified. To find all these papers, we looked through the titles of over 1,000 economics job market papers. We also asked for suggestions from peers. If we’ve missed anything, please feel free to send us suggestions (including your own paper) at abundanceandgrowth@coefficientgiving.org.
For more on why we’re sharing these, take a look at our first post on job market papers.
First we present only titles, so you can quickly skim what’s here. After the titles, we present titles plus abstracts.
Titles Index
Titles are presented in random order. There might be additional authors on these papers - we’ve listed the associated job market candidate only.
Partisan Climate Action, Utility Interests, and Policy Choice in the U.S. Power Sector by Witson Peña
Building with Externalities: Local Governments and Wind Farms by Zane Kashner
Clean Energy Subsidies and Capital Misallocation by Yuqi Zhang
Pollution Prevention or Green Innovation? Unraveling Firms’ Environmental Choices by Sumaya Falak Memon
Innovation Path Choices in China’s Electric Vehicle Battery Industry by Qian Wang
Pairing Batteries with Renewables: How Ownership Shapes Operational Incentives and Market Outcomes by Pietro Visaggio
Powering the Future: The Long-Term Human Capital Effects of Rural Electrification by Pan Chen
The Impact of Solar Panel Installation on Electricity Consumption and Production: A Firm’s Perspective by Natalia D’Agosti
The Role of Incumbent Firms and Regulation in America’s Natural Gas Energy Transition by Michael R. Karas
Technology Complementarities and Subsidy Policy: Evidence from Electric Vehicle and Solar Panel Adoption by Maria Garcia-Osipenko
Power to the people: The local economic effects of renewable energy communities in the UK by Gökhan Dilek
Capital Replacement and the Demand for Clean Technology by Felix Samy Soliman
Investment Responses to Environmental Policies: Carbon Taxes, Subsidies, and Public Investment by Ellie Cothren
Lone Star Grid: The Impact of Texas Electricity Interconnection by Connor Neff
Precautionary Electrification by Audrey Azerot
Transmission Congestion is Knocking the Wind Out of Renewable Investments by Abigail Boatwright
WIMBY: Wind In My Back Yard by Jacob Ebersole
When to go Green? Firm dynamics & Clean Technology Adoption by Bas Gorrens
The Role of Energy Efficiency in Productivity: Evidence from Canada by Anil Gogebakan
Titles, Abstracts, and Links to Papers
Partisan Climate Action, Utility Interests, and Policy Choice in the U.S. Power Sector
Witson Peña
This paper investigates how U.S. gubernatorial partisanship and electric utility interests jointly shape the adoption and stringency of three widely used electricity-sector climate policies: greenhouse gas cap-and-trade, emissions standards, and renewable portfolio standards. Using panel data for 48 states over 29 years, this study applies difference-indifferences and regression discontinuity designs that exploit within-state partisan alternation and quasi-random variation from close gubernatorial elections. The results indicate that Democratic governorships associate with higher probabilities of policy adoption and greater stringency than Republican ones. However, these partisan effects attenuate in states with fossil-intensive utility capacity and strengthen in renewable-rich states, particularly for discretionary and mandatory renewable portfolio standards. This work extends the empirical political economy literature by comparing instrument choice and stringency across three major electricity-sector climate policies and by evaluating how utility sector composition and reelection incentives moderate or amplify partisan influence. The findings highlight that electricity-sector decarbonization strategies need to account for both environmental externalities and the local political-economic conditions that shape feasible policy options.
Building with Externalities: Local Governments and Wind Farms
Zane Kashner
Does local government regulation of new infrastructure with local externalities result in efficiency? Although local governments’ choices can internalize local costs, political or contracting frictions may cause actual outcomes to deviate from the idealized benchmark of Coase (1960). I study this problem in the context of wind farms. I develop a model of interaction between wind developers and local governments where wind farms are built only if they are both profitable and allowed by local governments, who weigh local costs against payments from developers. I estimate that the average household’s cost of living three miles from a wind farm is around 7.5% of its home’s value. I find that built wind farms trade off more than $7 of engineering profit for each $1 of cost to households. This arises in part because local governments must be paid roughly $3 for every $1 of externality to approve projects. Moreover, I find that state regulations limiting payments to local governments further depress wind-farm construction. I compare the performance of alternative developer-government contracting rules in reaching the United States’ net-zero carbon goals. I find that requiring wind developers to pay local governments 20% of nearby homes’ value raises social welfare by about $220 billion relative to when developers cannot pay local governments.
Clean Energy Subsidies and Capital Misallocation
Yuqi Zhang
Clean-energy subsidies can seek both aggregate decarbonization and local economic development. I study such a policy in the context of the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy communities (EC) bonus, a place-based tax credit for renewable energy projects in fossil-fuel–dependent areas. I build a quantitative multi-region model in which profit-maximizing developers choose where to build renewables, electricity is traded across localized grids, and final-good producers use electricity as an input. Calibrated to U.S. data, the model shows the EC bonus successfully attracts investment in targeted regions but crowds out a meaningful fraction of investment from nearby non-targeted areas through lower electricity prices. The policy delivers modest local gains in wages and output in targeted areas that spill over to neighboring regions. Holding the fiscal cost fixed, a hypothetical subsidy that does not vary across space produces more additional renewable energy generation and greater fossil-fuel displacement than the EC bonus.
Pollution Prevention or Green Innovation? Unraveling Firms’ Environmental Choices
Sumaya Falak Memon
We study how firms internalize environmental constraints through two distinct channels: (i) pollution prevention; operational changes that reduce pollution at its source, and (ii) longer-term innovation captured by green patents. Linking data from S&P Compustat, the EPA TRI, and supplemental sources from 2001–2020, we find that, relative to firms that take no action and those that rely on source reduction only, firms that patent are capital-intensive, hold more cash, and operate in less-concentrated industries, while source-reduction firms are emission-intensive, and more exposed to regulatory scrutiny. Using Bartik-style and peer patenting instrumental variables to address endogeneity, we find meaningful substitution between the two actions. Relative to baseline means, ten additional green patents reduce source-reduction activity by about 10%, lower emissions by 37%, raise markups by 0.1–0.3%, and reduce the probability of a new enforcement case by roughly 3 pp. Source reduction, by contrast, delivers gains primarily on the environmental side, with ten additional measures lowering emissions by about 17% of the mean.
Innovation Path Choices in China’s Electric Vehicle Battery Industry
Qian Wang
Technologies that are equally green can yield very different gains in social welfare. I examine whether market-driven innovation in green industries follows the socially optimal technological path when firms face competing options with distinct cost structures, and explore policies that can correct potential inefficiencies in path choices. I estimate a dynamic structural model of Chinese electric vehicle (EV) battery suppliers choosing how much to innovate along two competing paths: Lithium-Ion–Ferro–Phosphate (LFP) and Nickel–Cobalt–Manganese (NCM). The analysis shows that a social planner would undertake about four times as much innovation as the market in LFP, which involves higher innovation sunk costs but delivers lower marginal costs in production. By contrast, the market innovates about twice as much as the social planner in NCM, which has the opposite cost structure. I attribute this divergence primarily to vertical separation between battery suppliers and EV makers, competition between EVs, and limited demand for EVs in early years, rather than to innovation spillovers or environmental benefits that firms fail to internalize. Finally, I demonstrate how R&D subsidies could help correct the path choice inefficiency and shift innovation toward the socially preferred path.
Pairing Batteries with Renewables: How Ownership Shapes Operational Incentives and Market Outcomes
Pietro Visaggio
This paper examines how battery storage ownership structure affects wholesale electricity market outcomes by shaping operational incentives. Using a dynamic dispatch model calibrated to Texas data, I show how transmission congestion creates conditions in which batteries operated jointly with a renewable plant are used strategically to increase the value of renewable production. The strength of this incentive depends on supply elasticity and the timing of renewable production. Co-owned batteries earn roughly 76 percent higher profits than standalone batteries in markets where strategic incentives arise. Despite this strategic behavior, co-owned and standalone batteries produce similar effects on consumer surplus, renewable curtailment, and carbon emissions. While market conditions do not generate enough profits for battery investment to be viable—regardless of ownership—the positive effects on consumer surplus and carbon emissions make batteries desirable from consumers’ perspective. Under a uniform subsidy policy, co-ownership’s higher profitability makes more batteries viable at moderate subsidy rates.
Powering the Future: The Long-Term Human Capital Effects of Rural Electrification
Pan Chen
This paper examines how rural electrification during middle childhood affected longterm human capital in 1990s China. Unlike most studies that focus on grid connection, my paper emphasizes electricity affordability. I develop a simple model of human capital investment in which electrification is an adult-labor-biased technical change in agriculture. Because children in middle childhood are poor substitutes for adult laborers in agricultural work, the productivity shock has little impact on their opportunity cost of schooling. The model therefore predicts a strong income effect and a negligible substitution effect, leading to higher schooling for children. I test this empirically using a cohort difference-in-differences design, leveraging variation in electricity price reductions across counties. I find that lower electricity prices in middle childhood significantly increase educational attainment and later adult cognitive scores. Increased agricultural productivity is identified as one mechanism, consistent with the model. This paper also highlights why older children are not significantly affected. China’s late-1990s experience offers insights for rural electrification efforts in many developing countries today
The Impact of Solar Panel Installation on ElectricityConsumption and Production: A Firm’s Perspective
Natalia D’Agosti
Since 2010, the Uruguayan government has fostered the installation of solar panels among firms to promote the production of small-scale renewable electricity. Under this policy, firms that have installed solar panels are allowed to feed any surplus electricity into the grid. Using firm-level electricity consumption and grid injection for all the firms that installed a microgenerator from April 2011 to September 2022, we study the economic and environmental consequences of this policy. First, we find that installing a solar panel reduces the amount of electricity extracted from the grid. Second, we find that it increases the electricity injected into the grid. Third, we find that it reduces CO2 emissions only marginally. Fourth, we provide evidence of a rebound effect, which ranges from 20% to 26%. Lastly, we propose an alternative policy that allows firms to store their excess electricity in batteries rather than immediately injecting it into the grid. This policy would further reduce CO2 emissions by 2.7%, incentivizing the injection of electricity at night, when fossil-fuel-based facilities meet the demand at the margin. This result highlights the importance of integrating storage solutions into renewable energy policy design.
The Role of Incumbent Firms and Regulation in America’s Natural Gas Energy Transition
Michael R. Karas
This paper examines how incumbent firms’ adoption of new energy technologies is shaped by the regulatory environment, focusing on the transition from manufactured to natural gas in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Using detailed, newly digitized panel data on municipality-level gas utility services, I exploit variation in pipeline proximity for municipalities along the pipeline’s path and regulatory changes introduced by the Natural Gas Act of 1938 to investigate incumbent utility firms’ decisions to switch from manufactured to natural gas. I find that incumbent firms delayed adopting natural gas during the initial unregulated period but accelerated adoption after the implementation of federal regulation. When considering the factors that predict early adoption by incumbents, ownership by a holding company is associated with switching before federal regulation, while higher switching costs are associated with switching after regulation. These results are consistent with federal regulation helping reduce the gap between regulated retail prices charged by gas utilities and previously unregulated wholesale pipeline prices, allowing incumbents to recoup switching costs, illustrating that coordination through regulation or holding company ownership can reduce uncertainty and expedite technological transitions.
Technology Complementarities and Subsidy Policy: Evidence from Electric Vehicle and Solar Panel Adoption
Maria Garcia-Osipenko
Government policies target air pollution and climate change by incentivizing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and/or residential solar panels (PVs). Knowledge of whether these goods are complements or substitutes can be used to design policies that target environmental externalities more efficiently. I use California household-level data to estimate a structural multi-product demand model. I find that consumers view PVs and EVs as complements, with the degree of complementarity varying with vehicle size and income. Counterfactual experiments reveal that complementarity significantly increases bundled EV-PV purchases. This complementarity can be leveraged to design policies that achieve emission targets at lower cost.
Power to the people: The local economic effects of renewable energy communities in the UK
Gökhan Dilek
Local opposition to renewable energy plants (Not In My Backyard) contrasts with citizen-led
renewable energy communities (RECs), where residents actively invest in and manage renewable projects. This contrast raises an important question: Do community renewable plants generate greater local economic benefits than commercial ones? By applying a heterogeneity-robust difference-in-difference estimator, our findings suggest that they do, while benefit-sharing practices also play a key role in shaping local outcomes. These results have important implications for the distributional dimensions of the energy transition and the broader green growth agenda.
Capital Replacement and the Demand for Clean Technology
Felix Samy Soliman
I study why clean technologies are adopted slowly and how this slow adoption undermines clean innovation. Using an event study around large energy price swings, I provide evidence that industries with short-lived assets see greater increases in energy efficiency and green patenting, consistent with lock-in among users of long-lived assets. To assess policy implications for the green transition, I embed the feedback between irreversible investment and energy saving innovation in an integrated assessment model. Slow adoption delays the pass-through of clean innovation to energy demand relative to benchmark models. The sluggish uptake of innovation justifies higher carbon taxes if the social cost of carbon rises with cumulative emissions. These higher taxes reduce investment, thereby reducing R&D incentives and further limiting the power of green innovation in facilitating emission reductions in the short to medium run. Replacement subsidies can partly substitute for carbon taxes. Uniform subsidies improve fuel efficiency but raise emissions via scale effects. Redirecting these subsidies toward electrification is a more effective second-best when the electricity mix is sufficiently clean.
Investment Responses to Environmental Policies: Carbon Taxes, Subsidies, and Public Investment
Ellie Cothren
Using a climate-economy model featuring fossil fuel and renewable energy infrastructure owned by both the public and private sector, I compute the economy’s optimal transition path to a new long-run equilibrium following a variety of policy shocks. Policy instruments include a $45 per ton carbon tax, a 30% subsidy on renewable energy consumption, and a $1 billion public investment in renewable infrastructure over ten years. While economic welfare is consistent across all policy scenarios analyzed, the responses of private energy investments vary. Private fossil fuel investments only decrease when a carbon tax is implemented, and decrease the most when all three policy instruments are used simultaneously. Private renewable investments increase nearly 4 times as much under a renewable subsidy than under a carbon tax. When public investment policy is implemented, it crowds out some private renewable investment, but this crowding-out effect disappears if another policy is implemented alongside the public investment. These findings highlight the complementary roles different environmental policy tools can play in the energy sector’s transition to renewable energy.
Lone Star Grid: The Impact of Texas Electricity Interconnection
Connor Neff
Using a novel least average cost dispatch (LACD) algorithm, this paper evaluates the economic and environmental costs of Texas maintaining an isolated electricity grid. We build a structural model to characterize the supply of electricity and simulate counterfactual integration scenarios. We find that Texas’s largest population zones connected with neighboring states to the East results in reductions of generation costs of $100M annually. We also show that accounting for fixed costs in the dispatch model allocates generation to units with lower average fixed costs than under least marginal cost dispatch. This change in allocation along the margin results in large differences in emissions impacts. We find that some interconnection scenarios decrease the social cost of emissions by up to $360M annually, while others result in higher emissions. In a case study for one proposed interconnection, we show that generation and revenues shift to the Texas zone. We also show that reductions in costs of maintaining reliability are about as much as generation cost reductions.
Precautionary Electrification
Audrey Azerot
This paper argues that households engage in precautionary electrification, i.e. they adopt electricity instead of gas to insure themselves against volatile gas prices. The analysis is motivated by two facts: (1) natural gas prices in the United States have been fluctuating more than electricity prices over the past two decades; and (2) lower-income households are more likely to rely on electricity for heating than higher-income households. Using state-level data from 1999 to 2023, I show that greater gas price volatility leads to higher electrification, particularly among low-income households. I calibrate a structural model of household energy choice with non-homothetic preferences and costly fuel switching which matches the empirical relationship between income, fuel choice, and energy expenditure. In the model, higher gas volatility increases electrification. However, it also decreases welfare, with poorer households suffering the most. Finally, I compare two insurance schemes (flat transfer and proportional subsidy) and show that precautionary electrification creates a policy trade-off between short-term insurance and long-term electrification.
Transmission Congestion is Knocking the Wind Out of Renewable Investments
Abigail Boatwright
Transmission congestion represents a critical bottleneck for the efficient deployment of renewable energy necessary to meet rising electricity demand and decarbonization targets. This paper provides the first causal quantification of how constraints within an electricity market region alter the scale and spatial allocation of energy investments. Crucially, congestion modifies incentives, creating downside risk that deters renewables while generating profitable rents that sustain otherwise uneconomic fossil fuel projects. I estimate a developer entry and location choice model to distinguish how congestion drives both early site screening and later project attrition. Empirical results using data from Texas confirm that high congestion losses strongly discourage applications and push renewables from optimal resource-rich sites. Counterfactual simulations illustrate substantial welfare gains: relieving the ten most constrained lines boosts planned renewable output by 1.6 million MWh and corrects spatial misallocation, with 8% of the increase coming from projects moving to more productive sites. Simultaneously, the targeted congestion relief deters over 1,500 MW of planned fossil fuel investment, avoiding an estimated $608 million annually in CO2 damages. These findings demonstrate that current U.S. regulatory practice, which omits the value of generation investment effects in transmission cost-benefit analysis, significantly undervalues strategic transmission planning, risking suboptimal infrastructure deployment.
WIMBY: Wind In My Back Yard
Jacob Ebersole
Wind energy projects generate global environmental benefits that greatly exceed local property value losses. Yet county governments often reject proposed projects. To assess the electoral incentives of permit-issuing county officials, I link spatial variation in local costs and benefits to precinct-level election results in Illinois. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that incumbent county officials lose vote share in precincts that incur property value losses following project approvals, but gain votes in precincts that benefit from higher school district property tax revenues.
When to go Green? Firm dynamics & Clean Technology Adoption
Bas Gorrens
Carbon pricing is a central policy instrument for reducing emissions, but governments face a trade-off: faster decarbonization can raise output losses and carbon leakage, while gradual implementation slows emission reductions. This paper studies how EU carbon policies have shaped firms’ adoption of abatement technologies and identifies the optimal trajectory to reach the EU’s 2050 net zero target, particularly in a unilateral context. I develop a dynamic heterogeneous-firm model in which forward-looking manufacturing firms choose when to adopt discrete abatement technologies under a gradually tightening carbon price. I estimate it using panel data on EU ETS firms from 2005-2019. The model rationalizes the low carbon prices of the 2010s as a consequence of gradual policy and firm anticipation. Emission reductions arise mainly from large, productive, and initially polluting firms. Anticipation of future tightening mitigates half of the short-run output losses in 2025 and two-thirds by 2050, keeping overall output losses below 2%. A moderately faster tightening could cut cumulative emissions by 15% at an additional cost of only 0.11% of output. Finally, because firms anticipate future policy changes, unilateral and global carbon pricing yield nearly identical effects on domestic output and carbon leakage.
The Role of Energy Efficiency in Productivity: Evidence from Canada
Anil Gogebakan
This paper quantifies how misallocation of energy, alongside capital and labor, across provinces and sectors reduces productivity. Using Canadian provincial input–output data (2014–2020) within a Hsieh–Klenow framework, I decompose productivity losses into interprovincial (within-sector) and intersectoral (within-province) components and estimate each input’s contribution separately. Unlike most studies focused on the manufacturing sector, this is the first comprehensive analysis of energy misallocation covering the entire economy. Results suggest misallocation lowers aggregate productivity by 5–8%, with most of the gap driven by within-sector distortions. Energy, though only around 8% of input costs, accounts for up to 1.5% of the gap—comparable to capital and exceeding labor—highlighting its outsized role. The findings identify interprovincial barriers and energy market distortions as key areas for narrowing productivity gaps and guiding climate policy. Reallocating energy could significantly improve productivity while reducing emissions, delivering a ‘double dividend.’