Bio

Sheila Olmstead is a Professor at Cornell Brooks Public Policy and an Atkinson Scholar and Senior Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. Prior to joining Cornell in 2024, she was the Dean Rusk Chair at the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs. She also previously served on the faculty at the Yale School of the Environment and as a Fellow at Resources for the Future. 

Professor Olmstead's research and teaching interests are in the area of environmental economics and policy.  Her work has been published in leading journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Science, and Water Resources Research. With Nathaniel Keohane, she is the co-author of the environmental and resource economics textbook, Markets and the Environment.

Olmstead is a University Fellow at Resources for the Future, a Senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. From 2021-25, she was a Member of the Science Advisory Board at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In 2016-2017, Professor Olmstead served in the White House as Senior Economist for Energy and the Environment on the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

Here is a link to Professor Olmstead's Google Scholar page.