Faculty Research Video: Ashley Langer, Environmental Economics

Ashley Langer, associate professor of economics in the Eller College of Management, studies how alternative policy approaches will change environmental outcomes by merging theoretical insights with econometric modeling that allows her to recover the drivers of individuals’ and firms’ behavior.

“The goal is to be able to protect the environment without sacrificing economic prosperity,” says Langer.

One of her most recent research projects focuses on how we can use dynamic enforcement to enforce the Clean Air Act.

Langer uses frontier economic methods to evaluate the impact of environmental and energy policies. Professor Langer’s interest in environmental economics stems from an observation that—because individual choices have environmental repercussions—policies such as subsidies, regulations, and standards are often crucial for improving environmental outcomes. Building on this observation, her research evaluates how alternative policy approaches will change environmental outcomes by merging theoretical insights with econometric modelling that allows her to recover the drivers of individuals’ and firms’ behavior. Professor Langer studies fundamental forces that affect many industries (for instance, the role of dynamic incentives on policy design and enforcement), major industries with widespread environmental impact (for instance, the use of gasoline for transportation), and econometric approaches to solving research questions faced far beyond environmental economics (for instance, the measurement of policy uncertainty). Before coming to the University of Arizona in 2012, Professor Langer worked at the University of Michigan and the Brookings Institution, and she earned degrees from the University of California-Berkeley and Northwestern University.