Erich Muehlegger
Education
Ph.D., economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Summary of Experience
Professor Muehlegger’s research interests include industrial organization, public finance, and environmental policy, with a particular focus on the energy and transportation sectors. His work examines how regulatory policy can be used to affect the decisions of firms and consumers, and how insights can be applied to design better regulations and incentives. Professor Muehlegger has, for example, explored how drivers modify their behavior and vehicle purchase decisions in response to changes in state gasoline taxes, compared the efficacy of different hybrid vehicle incentives, and authored a paper that models how refineries respond to changing environmental regulations. He is the author of a paper that studies the effect of federal regulatory innovation on diesel fuel tax evasion, among other research on the counterproductive effects of regulation and energy taxes. Professor Muehlegger’s work has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals and covered in various press, television, and radio outlets. He is a faculty affiliate at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He was formerly on the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School, where he served as a fellow of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the faculty chair of the Regulatory Policy Program.
