James Michael Sallee

About

James M. Sallee is an economist specializing in energy, climate, policy, taxes, and the environment. He is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches and conducts research. Sallee is affiliated with the Energy Institute at Haas and is part of the leadership team for the Master of Climate Solutions program, an interdisciplinary professional degree focused on fostering solutions to the climate crisis. Additionally, he contributes to decarbonization efforts at Amazon. His work and research are aimed at addressing critical issues related to the environment and climate change, with a focus on developing effective policies and solutions for a better planet.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Microeconomics
• Engineering
• Public economics
• Market economy
• Economics
• Environmental economics
• Natural resource economics

Selected publications

• The Economics of Attribute-Based Regulation: Theory and Evidence from Fuel Economy Standards

  The Review of Economics and Statistics · 2017-08-11 · 118 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper analyzes "attribute-based regulations," in which regulatory compliance depends upon some secondary attribute that is not the intended target of the regulation. For example, in many countries, fuel-economy standards mandate that vehicles have a certain fuel economy, but heavier or larger vehicles are allowed to meet a lower standard. Such policies create perverse incentives to distort the attribute upon which compliance depends. We develop a theoretical framework to predict how actors…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Use of Regression Statistics to Analyze Imperfect Pricing Policies

  Journal of Political Economy · 2019-07-23 · 46 citations

  articleOpen access

  Corrective taxes can solve many market failures, but actual policies frequently deviate from the theoretical ideal because of administrative or political constraints. We present a method to quantify the efficiency costs of constraints on externality-correcting policies or, more generally, the costs of imperfect pricing, using simple regression statistics. Under certain conditions, the R2 and the sum of squared residuals from a regression of true externalities on policy variables measure relative…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tax incidence with endogenous quality and costly bargaining: Theory and evidence from hybrid vehicle subsidies

  Journal of Public Economics · 2017-09-18 · 39 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Regulating Untaxable Externalities: Are Vehicle Air Pollution Standards Effective and Efficient?

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2023 · 38 citations

  Abstract The world has 1.4 billion passenger vehicles. How should governments regulate their air pollution emissions? A Pigouvian tax is technologically infeasible. Most countries instead rely on exhaust standards that limit air pollution emissions per mile for new vehicles. We assess the effectiveness and efficiency of these standards, which are the centerpiece of U.S. Clean Air Act regulation of transportation, and counterfactual policies. We show that the air pollution emissions per mile of n…

  PublisherDOI

• Flawed analyses of U.S. auto fuel economy standards

  Science · 2018-12-07 · 33 citations

  article

  A 2018 analysis discarded at least $112 billion in benefits

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Arthur van Benthem

  82 shared

• Mark R. Jacobsen

  82 shared

• Christopher R. Knittel

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  77 shared

• Koichiro Ito

  University of Chicago

  53 shared

• Soren Anderson

  43 shared

• Carolyn Fischer

  20 shared

• Ian Parry

  19 shared

• Joseph Shapiro

  University of California, Berkeley

  12 shared

Similar researchers at University of California, Berkeley

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