Charles Kolstad

Prof. Charles D. Kolstad is an energy and environmental economist with a research focus on the economics of climate change. He is also involved in research on energy markets, fossil fuels being largely responsible for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. He has been a Lead Author and a Convening Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize), is a founding Co-Editor of the University of Chicago Press journal Review of Environmental Economics & Policy and has served on many advisory boards. He is a former president of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE).

At Stanford, Prof. Kolstad is the co-faculty director of the Bits & Watts Initiative. In addition to his affiliation with the Department of Economics, Prof. Kolstad holds senior fellow appointments in the Precourt Institute for Energy (PIE), the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and the Woods Institute for the Environment. Prior to joining Stanford in 2012, Prof. Kolstad was a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the Bren Distinguished Professor of Environmental Economics, Chair of the Department of Economics and co-director of the UC system-wide University of California Center for Energy and Environmental Economics (UCE3). He is a University Fellow at Resources for the Future (Washington, DC), a Fellow of CESifo (Munich) and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA).

PhD students who wish to study with him (or another Stanford professor in the field of environmental, resource or energy economics) should first apply to a degree-granting department or program at Stanford (such as Economics, Management Science & Engineering, the Graduate School of Business or the Emmet Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources), mentioning my name (no need to contact me in advance). See further information in the link at the side of this page ("Info for Prospective PhD Students").