Charles Kolstad
Institute Role
Head of Economics & Policy Solutions Group
Role in Affiliated Centers
Co-Director of University of California Center for Energy
and Environmental Economics
Research
Charles Kolstad’s research interests are broadly in
environmental economics and industrial organization. Energy use and
technology adoption are, ultimately, economic questions within a policy
context, which is why Kolstad believes it is so important to couple consumer
education and energy efficiency. Accordingly, he is interested in the role information plays in environmental
decision-making and regulation, and does much of his applied work in the area
of climate change and energy markets. He currently has
several projects related to uncertainty and learning in strategic contexts
regarding the provision of public goods.
For the most part, the context is international environmental
agreements. This work is primarily theoretical, though he is doing some
experimental work to validate and illuminate the theoretical results.
Biography
Charles Kolstad is an
internationally known economist who once served as a Peace Corps volunteer in
Ghana and has taught at universities in the U.S, Russia, and Belgium. He
was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize), was a member of the National
Academy of Sciences committee charged with evaluating the U.S. Climate Change
Research Program, and is an advisor to the California Air Resources Board. He
is a former president of the Association of Environmental and Resource
Economists, and editor of the journal Review of Environmental Economics & Policy. His more
than 100 publications include the undergraduate text Environmental
Economics which has been translated into Japanese, Spanish and
Chinese. At UC Santa Barbara, Kolstad is a Professor in the Bren School of
Environmental Science & Management and in the Department of Economics. He
is also Co-Director of the newly established University of California Center
for Energy & Environmental Economics, a joint undertaking of UC Berkeley
and UC Santa Barbara. He is a University Fellow at Resources for the
Future (Washington), a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic
Research (Cambridge) and a Fellow of CESifo (Munich). In 2009 he was
elected Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource
Economists. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1982.
