James Bushnell

About

James Bushnell is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley, along with a Master's degree in Operations Research from Berkeley and a Bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Prior to joining UC Davis, he spent 15 years as the Research Director of the University of California Energy Institute in Berkeley and two years as the Cargill Chair in Energy Economics at Iowa State University. Professor Bushnell has long been actively involved in energy and environmental policy. Since 2002, he has served as a member of the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator and has advised the California Air Resources Board on emissions trading and climate policies. His research focuses on energy and environmental economics, industrial organization, regulation, and energy policy. He teaches courses in intermediate microeconomics, energy economics, and graduate industrial organization.

Research topics

• Economics
• Natural resource economics
• Engineering
• Environmental economics
• Business
• Environmental science
• Microeconomics
• Physics
• Electrical engineering
• Transport engineering

Selected publications

• Do Two Electricity Pricing Wrongs Make a Right? Cost Recovery, Externalities, and Efficiency

  American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2022 · 87 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Economists favor pricing pollution in part so that consumers face the full social marginal cost (SMC) of goods and services. But even absent externalities, retail electricity prices typically exceed private marginal cost, due to a utility’s need to cover average costs. Furthermore, the SMC of electricity can fluctuate widely hour-to-hour, while retail prices do not. We show that residential electricity rates exceed average SMC in most of the US, but there is large geographic and temporal variati…

  PublisherDOI

• Setting with the Sun: The Impacts of Renewable Energy on Conventional Generation

  Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists · 2021 · 80 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Policies supporting investment in renewable electricity have been a cornerstone of climate policy in many parts of the world. While previous empirical work explores the economic and environmental impacts of renewable production, the focus has been on the short-run impacts of expanding renewable supply. In this paper, we shed light on the potential longer-run impacts of renewable expansions. Focusing on California’s electricity market, we estimate how wholesale electricity prices have responded t…

  PublisherDOI

• Low Energy: Estimating Electric Vehicle Electricity Use

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2021 · 53 citations

  We provide the first at-scale estimate of electric vehicle (EV) home charging. Previous estimates are based on conflicting surveys or are extrapolated from a small, unrepresentative sample of households with dedicated EV meters. We combine billions of hourly electricity meter measurements with address-level EV registration records from California households, including 64,000 EV owners. The average EV increases overall household load by 2.9 kilowatt-hours per day, well under half the amount assum…

  PublisherDOI

• Energy Prices and Electric Vehicle Adoption

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-03-01 · 41 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper presents evidence that gasoline prices have a larger effect on demand for electric vehicles (EVs) than electricity prices in California. We match a spatially-disaggregated panel dataset of monthly EV registration records to detailed records of gasoline and electricity prices in California from 2014-2017, and use these to estimate the effect of energy prices on EV demand. Two distinct empirical approaches (panel fixed-effects and a utility-border discontinuity) yield remarkably similar…

  PublisherDOI

• Headwinds and Tailwinds: Implications of Inefficient Retail Energy Pricing for Energy Substitution

  Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy · 2022-01-01 · 26 citations

  articleSenior author

  Electrification of transportation and buildings to reduce greenhouse gas emissions requires massive switching from natural gas and refined petroleum products. All three end-use energy sources are mispriced due in part to the unpriced pollution they emit. Natural gas and electricity utilities also face the classic natural monopoly challenge of recovering fixed costs while maintaining efficient pricing. We study the magnitude of these distortions for electricity, natural gas, and gasoline purchase…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Severin Borenstein

  49 shared

• Catherine Wolfram

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  47 shared

• Frank A. Wolak

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  25 shared

• Carla Peterman

  19 shared

• Erin T. Mansur

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  16 shared

• David Rapson

  15 shared

• Jonathan E. Hughes

  World Conservation Monitoring Centre

  12 shared

• Christopher R. Knittel

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  9 shared

Similar researchers at University of California, Davis

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• Katherine Erikssonh-66
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