Catherine Wolfram

Catherine Wolfram is the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration in the Business & Economics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She earned an AB from Harvard University in 1989 and a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University. At Haas, Wolfram served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2019 to 2021, Faculty Director of the Energy Institute at Haas, and Faculty Director of The E2e Project, a research organization dedicated to energy efficiency. She is also the Program Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Environment and Energy Economics Program, as well as an affiliated faculty member in Berkeley’s Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics and the Energy and Resources Group.

Wolfram specializes in energy economics, with research on energy markets worldwide, including rural electrification programs in developing countries, energy efficiency initiatives in the United States, the effects of environmental regulations such as climate change mitigation policies on energy sectors, and the impacts of privatization and restructuring in the US and UK electricity industries. She has implemented randomized controlled trials to evaluate energy programs in the US, Ghana, Kenya, and India. Key publications include “Do Energy Efficiency Investments Deliver? Evidence from the Weatherization Assistance Program” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2018, with Meredith Fowlie and Michael Greenstone), “How Will Energy Demand Develop in the Developing World?” (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2012, with Orie Shelef and Paul Gertler), “Measuring Duopoly Power in the British Electricity Spot Market” (American Economic Review, 1999), and “Experimental Evidence on the Economics of Rural Electrification” (Journal of Political Economy, 2020, with Kelvin Lee and Edward Miguel). Wolfram received the United States Association for Energy Economics 2022 Adelman-Frankel Award and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025. She served on leave from Berkeley as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate and Energy Economics at the US Department of the Treasury from 2021 to 2022.

Professional Email: cwolfram@berkeley.edu