Master of Science (MS) in Agricultural and Resource Economics

Students benefit from the mentorship of faculty conducting cutting-edge work on various aspects of energy demand and supply, including energy markets, climate change economics, environmental policies, and related benefit-cost analyses, and more:

Anna Alberini is a professor in UMD’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, where she teaches PhD econometrics and undergraduate climate change economics and supervises graduate and undergraduate research projects. An energy and environmental economist, her work covers residential energy demand, energy efficiency decisions and their consequences, policies shaping household energy use, and vehicle fuel economy and driving behavior. She is an editor of Energy Economics, serves on the editorial board of The Energy Journal and the advisory board of Energy Policy, and is a former associate editor of Energy Efficiency. Alberini has served on the American Statistical Association’s Advisory Committee to the U.S. Energy Information Administration and twice on the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board for Environmental Economics.

Jim Archsmith is an assistant professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UMD specializing in energy and environmental economics, industrial organization, and applied econometrics. His research focuses on the costs and environmental impacts of electricity generation regulations, automobile fuel economy standards, and programs promoting electric vehicle adoption. By examining how households and firms respond to policies and technologies, he evaluates strategies for designing effective, low-cost emissions reductions and energy transitions.

Josh Linn is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF). His research examines how environmental policies and market incentives affect households and businesses in the transportation, electricity, and industrial sectors. He has studied fuel economy standards and vehicle taxation in the U.S. and Europe, Beijing’s vehicle ownership restrictions, and the effectiveness of cap-and-trade and other policy instruments in electricity markets, as well as the role of natural gas prices and regulation in U.S. coal’s decline. His work on industry has explored how energy prices influence technology adoption and how carbon pricing affects competitiveness. He has published widely in environmental, energy, and health economics. Previously, he was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a research scientist at MIT, served as a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers (2014–2015), and is currently on a National Academy of Sciences committee on light-duty fuel economy.

Louis Preonas is an associate professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UMD and an energy and environmental economist. His research examines distortions in U.S. energy markets, including market power in coal transportation and the incomplete pass-through of carbon taxes. At the intersection of environmental and development economics, he studies the economic impacts of electricity access in developing countries. Ongoing projects include evaluating the costs of inefficient electricity supply in India, estimating demand elasticities for electricity and groundwater in California agriculture to understand pumping externalities, water substitution, and planting decisions, and improving the design of randomized experiments with panel data.

Rob Williams studies environmental and tax policy, focusing on how the two interact. His research analyzes climate and energy policies such as carbon pricing, emissions regulation, and tax reforms to balance environmental goals with economic efficiency and equity. In addition to his role at UMD, he is Chief Economist for the Climate Leadership Council, a University Fellow at Resources for the Future, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was previously an associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin; a visiting research scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research; and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Williams has served as coeditor of both the Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.