Ashley Langer

Ashley 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.

Courses

• ECON 200 Basic Economic Issues
• ECON 373 Environmental Economics
• ECON 551 Business Strategy
• ECON 696W Empirical Environmental and Energy Economics

Publications

• "Designing Dynamic Subsidies to Spur Adoption of New Technologies” (with Derek Lemoine) Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 9(6), November, 2022 (Winner of Ralph C. d’Arge and Allen V. Kneese Award for Outstanding Publication in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists)
• "Escalation of Scrutiny: The Gains from Dynamic Enforcement of Environmental Regulations,"  American Economic Review, 2020, 110(8), pp. 2558-85 (with W. Blundell and G. Gowrisankaran)
• "From Gallons to Miles: A Disaggregate Analysis of Automobile Travel and Externality Taxes," Journal of Public Economics, 2017,152, pp. 34-46 (with V. Maheshri and C. Winston)
• "The Intergenerational Transmission of Automobile Brand Preferences," Journal of Industrial Economics, 2015, 63(4), pp. 763-93 (with S. Anderson, R. Kellogg and J. Sallee)
• "Automakers' Short-Run Responses to Changing Gasoline Prices," Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013, 95(4), pp. 1198-1211 (with N. Miller)
• "Toward A Comprehensive Assessment of Road Pricing Accounting for Land Use," Brookings-Wharton papers on Urban Affairs, 2008, pp.127-75 (with C. Winston)
• "The Effect of Government Highway Spending on Road Users' Congestion Costs," Journal of Urban Economics, 2006, 60(3), pp.463-83 (with C. Winston)