Lawrence Goulder

About

Lawrence Goulder is the Shuzo Nishihara Professor in Environmental and Resource Economics at Stanford University and the Director of the Stanford Center for Environmental and Energy Policy Analysis. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and at Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a University Fellow of Resources for the Future. Goulder's research examines the environmental and economic impacts of environmental policies in the U.S. and China, with a focus on policies to address climate change and air pollution. His work has also explored the sustainability of natural resources and well-being in several countries. He has conducted analyses for government agencies, business groups, and environmental organizations, and has served on advisory committees to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board. His research often employs a general equilibrium analytical framework that integrates the economy and the environment, considering the activities of government, industry, and households, and analyzing both the benefits and costs of policies as well as their distributional impacts. Goulder holds an A.B. in philosophy from Harvard College, a master's degree in musical composition from the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

Research topics

• Business
• Economics
• Political Science
• Natural resource economics
• Computer Science
• Geology
• Psychology
• Operations management
• Microeconomics
• Geography

Selected publications

• Impacts of a carbon tax across US household income groups: What are the equity-efficiency trade-offs?

  Journal of Public Economics · 2019-05-21 · 267 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Timing Is Everything: How Economists Can Better Address the Urgency of Stronger Climate Policy

  Review of Environmental Economics and Policy · 2019-10-23 · 56 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Building on recent consensus findings from climate scientists, this article argues that stronger policy action to address global climate change is urgent. The article indicates how economists can better address this urgency and thereby contribute more effectively to climate policy discussions. Greater effectiveness requires that economists focus their policy assessments more sharply on the timing of policy implementation and the environmental and economic costs of delayed implementation. The art…

  PublisherDOI

• China's Rate-Based Approach to Reducing CO₂ Emissions: Attractions, Limitations, and Alternatives

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2018-05-01 · 33 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A distinguishing feature of China's recently launched emissions trading system (ETS) is its rate-based structure. This structure governs the way emissions allowances are allocated and the conditions for compliance, and it has important implications for system performance. We show that the rate-based structure implies a wedge between the marginal costs of emissions abatement as perceived by firms and society's marginal costs of abatement. Moving to a mass-based system would eliminate this wedge a…

  PublisherDOI

• China's Unconventional Nationwide CO₂ Emissions Trading System: The Wide-Ranging Impacts of an Implicit Output Subsidy

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2019-12-01 · 26 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  China is planning to implement the largest CO 2 emissions trading system in the world. To reduce emissions, the system will be a tradable performance standard (TPS), an emissions pricing mechanism that differs significantly from the emissions pricing instruments used in other countries, such as cap and trade (C&T) and a carbon tax. We employ matching analytically and numerically solved models to assess the cost-effectiveness and distributional impacts of China's forthcoming TPS for achieving CO…

  PublisherDOI

• THE SENSITIVITY OF CO₂ EMISSIONS UNDER A CARBON TAX TO ALTERNATIVE BASELINE FORECASTS

  Climate Change Economics · 2018-02-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access

  Future carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions under a carbon tax depend on the time-path of the economy under baseline (business-as-usual) conditions as well as the extent to which the policy reduces emissions relative to the baseline. Considerable uncertainties surround the baseline forecasts for fuel prices, energy efficiency (energy-GDP ratios), and GDP, as evidenced by the significant ranges in the forecasts by government agencies and research institutions in the U.S. This paper assesses the signi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Effects of Environmental Taxes in the Presence of Other Taxes

  NSF · $136k · 1993–1998

Frequent coauthors

• A.L. Bovenberg

  76 shared

• Roberton C. Williams

  59 shared

• Marc Hafstead

  39 shared

• Ian Parry

  26 shared

• Barry Eichengreen

  University of California, Berkeley

  26 shared

• Robert N. Stavins

  Harvard University Press

  20 shared

• Mark R. Jacobsen

  18 shared

• Kenneth J. Arrow

  17 shared

Similar researchers at Stanford University

• Hau Leeh-70
• Terry Moeh-52
• Shanjun Lih-49