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I am an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business.
My research interests are in Industrial Organization, and Energy and Environmental Economics. I develop empirical methods to understand better the design of policies that aim to mitigate climate change.
My CV
Subsidy programs for green durable goods such as rooftop solar often fail to account for heterogeneous environmental benefits, generate large inframarginal transfers financed by distortionary taxes, and disproportionately benefit high-income households. I develop a dynamic discrete choice model of durable-good adoption nested in an optimal-taxation framework that embeds heterogeneous environmental externalities, type-specific welfare weights, and a marginal cost of funds into the policymaker’s problem, and characterize the welfare-maximizing choice-based subsidy.
I apply the framework to California’s residential rooftop‑solar market, assembling a new dataset linking utility billing records, measures of rooftop solar potential, and installation data. Counterfactual simulations underscore the redistributive costs of inframarginal transfers in this setting. A simple modification that adds modest fixed interconnection charges for higher‑consumption households to the California Solar Initiative schedule attains close to 90 percent of the first‑best gains, indicating that simple targeting rules can capture most of the benefits from targeting in this setting.
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