Dr. William A. Pizer
Willilam A. Pizer has been a Fellow in RFF’s Quality of the Environment Division since 1996. His research seeks to quantify how various features of environmental policy and economic context, including uncertainty, individual and regional variation, technological change, irreversibility, spillovers, voluntary participation, and flexibility, influence a policy's efficacy. He applies much of this work to the question of how to design and implement policies to reduce the threat of climate change caused by manmade emissions of greenhouse gases. Recently, his work has considered the influence of uncertainty on discounting, the advantages of price versus quantity regulation for pollutants that accumulate in the environment, and consequences of environmental regulation on firm performance.
Currently, he is working on projects that look at the regional variation in household energy use, firm variation in pollution control costs, the effectiveness of voluntary programs, the role of technology programs in pollution control efforts, and consequences of banking and borrowing in pollution permit markets. Since August 2002, Pizer has worked part-time as a Senior Economist at the National Commission on Energy Policy. During 2001-2002, he served as a Senior Economist at the President's Council of Economic Advisers where he worked on environment and climate change issues.
He was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University's Center for Environmental Science and Policy during 2000-2001, and taught at Johns Hopkins University during 1997-1999. Pizer holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Harvard University, and a B.A. in Physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.