Erich Muehlegger, Ph.D.

Erich Muehlegger is an assistant professor in the economics department at UC-Davis and a faculty research fellow at the NBER.  Formerly, he was on the faculty at Harvard Kennedy School, a fellow of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and former faculty chair of the Regulatory Policy Program.  His research interests include industrial organization, public finance and environmental policy, especially in the context of the energy and transportation sectors.  His research focuses on how regulatory policy can be used to affect the decisions of firms and consumers and, in particular, how insights can be used to design better regulations and incentives.  One line of research examines how a broad array of environmental policies, from fuel taxes to hybrid vehicle incentives to fuel content regulations, affect the behavior of producers and the decision of consumers.  Examples of his work in this area include an examination of how drivers change driving behavior and vehicle purchase decision in response to changes in state gasoline taxes, a comparison of the efficacy of different hybrid vehicle incentives and a paper that models how refineries respond to changing environmental regulations.  A second set of projects estimate counterproductive effects of regulation and energy taxes, including a paper that studies the effect of federal regulatory innovation on diesel fuel tax evasion.  His work has been published in top academic journals and covered by the popular press, television and radio. He received his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005.