Eller Economics Professor Featured in KOLD

Ashley Langer, associate professor of economics in the Eller College of Management, was featured in a September 21 KOLD clip explaining why gas prices in Arizona are declining slower than in other parts of the country.

“Part of that is going to be the refining facilities that we have available to the rest of Arizona customers,” says Langer. “And the other is just changing demand in Arizona like driving and taking long road trips relative to the rest of the country.”

She also pointed out that it’s normal for gas prices to fall after summer as people wrap up their trips.

Langer uses frontier economic methods to evaluate the impact of environmental and energy policies. Her 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. 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, she worked at the University of Michigan and the Brookings Institution and earned degrees from the University of California-Berkeley and Northwestern University.