Murphy-Economics Seminar: Ashley Langer (Arizona)

The Murphy Institute Spring Seminar Series in Economics

Each semester The Murphy Institute sponsors a series of seminars organized by the Tulane Department of Economics that provides an opportunity for faculty, researchers, and practitioners to present their latest research and pressing issues related to topics in political economy. Research presented covers all aspects of contemporary economics, including the economics of education, health economics, and public economics, as well as in economic history, international economics, and core areas in political economy.  Papers are distributed one week beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.

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.