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.
Bistline, John, Kimberly A. Clausing, Neil Mehrotra, James H. Stock, and Catherine Wolfram. Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy. Forthcoming. NBER Working Paper 32168.
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.
John Bistline, Kimberly Clausing, Neil Mehrotra, James Stock, and Catherine Wolfram. In The Hamilton Project, Washington, D.C.: February 2024.
A Republican sweep could reverse the Biden administration’s signature 2022 climate law. MIT Sloan economist Catherine Wolfram analyzes four potential outcomes.
MIT Sloan students have the opportunity to study generative AI management, analytics for digital platforms, and global energy economies in 2024 – 2025.
"We know that Trump would take us out of the Paris agreement. Losing that global leadership would be one of the losses of a Trump presidency."
Polling suggests that the IRA has enjoyed broad popularity but some of the climate change proposals are less popular among Republican lawmakers.
Catherine Wolfram argues that a tax on carbon would reduce greenhouse gas emissions more efficiently than a tax rebate for E.V.s.
"If they're not using [coal mines] to make sustainable aviation fuel, the methane is going to go into the atmosphere."
