Catherine Wolfram is an associate professor of business administration at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business and co-director of the Energy Institute at Haas. She is also a researcher at the UC Energy Institute, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an affiliated faculty member in the Agriculture and Resource Economics department and the Energy and Resources Group at Berkeley. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and on the editorial board of the Energy Journal, the Economics Journal and the Journal of Industrial Economics. Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets.  She has studied electricity industry privatization and restructuring around the world and has analyzed the effects of environmental regulation, including climate change mitigation policies, on the energy sector. 

She is currently implementing several randomized control trials to evaluate energy efficiency programs. She received a PhD in economics from MIT in 1996 and an AB from Harvard in 1989.  Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of economics at Harvard.

"Let There Be Light: Reducing Poverty Affects the Demand for Energy "

Abstract: Over the next several decades, economic development and anti-poverty programs will likely lift the incomes of the world’s poor.  In this paper, we study the implications for energy use, focusing on the accumulation of energy-using assets.  We begin by developing a simple model of household asset accumulation as a function of income when consumers are credit constrained.  We show that households are more likely to give up consumption of non-durables, such as food, in order to acquire durables, such as refrigerators, when transfers are lumpy or income growth is fast.  We find empirical support for this model using data from Oportunidades, the Mexican conditional cash transfer program that began in 1998.  Specifically, among households that received the same level of cumulative transfers, we find fewer refrigerators purchased by those that were randomly selected to begin receiving the transfers earlier, suggesting that they have accumulated the transfers over a longer time period.  We go on to show that income has a negligible effect on energy use conditional on asset ownership, confirming that the main driver of increased energy use among poor Mexicans has been the accumulation of energy-using assets.  We conclude by showing that the effects we have identified suggest large cross-country differences in the relationship between per capita GDP and energy use, which have not been recognized in previous projections.