Ashley Langer

Ashley Langer is a Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona. She 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).