Maximilian Auffhammer
What are the regional short and long run responses of household electricity consumption to weather and climate change? Using a dataset with more than one billion electricity bills for California households, Maximilian Auffhammer’s current research attempts to quantify the impact of adaptation on long-term projections of residential electricity demand. He was CESifo guest researcher from 5 to 8 August.
In recent wok with Michael Anderson (Berkeley), which is forthcoming in the Review of Economic Studies, Mr Auffhammer has examined the fact that heavier vehicles are safer for their own occupants but more hazardous for other vehicles, which implies that an unregulated vehicle fleet is inefficiently heavy. Controlling for own-vehicle weight, being hit by a vehicle that is 1,000 pounds heavier generates a 40% to 50% increase in fatality risk. This points to a total accident-related externality that exceeds the estimated social cost of US carbon emissions and is equivalent to a gas tax of $0.97 per gallon ($136 billion annually). The researchers consider two policies for internalizing this external cost: a weight-varying mileage tax and a gas tax. Their findings suggest that European gas taxes may be much closer to optimal levels than the US gas tax.
Maximilian Auffhammer joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2003, having received a PhD in economics from UC San Diego earlier that year. His research focuses on environmental and resource economics, energy economics and applied econometrics. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Energy and Environmental Economics group, a Humboldt Foundation Fellow, and a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Mr Auffhammer serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. His research has appeared in The American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Economic Journal, the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, The Energy Journal and other academic journals.