Severin Borenstein is E.T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at the Haas School of Business and Co-Director of the Energy Institute at Haas. He is also Director of the University of California Energy Institute. He received his A.B. from U.C. Berkeley and Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T. His research focuses on business competition, strategy, and regulation. He has published extensively on the airline industry, the oil and gasoline industries, and electricity markets. His current research projects include the economics of renewable energy, economic policies for reducing greenhouse gases, alternative models of retail electricity pricing, and competitive dynamics in the airline industry. Borenstein is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA. He served on the Board of Governors of the California Power Exchange from 1997 to 2003. During 1999-2000, he was a member of the California Attorney General's Gasoline Price Task Force. In 2010-11, Borenstein was a member of U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood's Future of Aviation Advisory Committee. In 2012-13, he served on the Emissions Market Assessment Committee, which advised the California Air Resources Board on the operation of California’s Cap and Trade market for greenhouse gases.
University of California, Berkeley, A.B. Economics (1978
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D. Economics (1983)
Why Can’t U.S. Airlines Make Money?” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings,
101(May 2011). (A longer version is available as NBER Working Paper #16744)“The Public and Private Economics of Renewable Energy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives,
26(Winter 2012).“The Equity and Efficiency of Two-Part Tariffs in U.S. Natural Gas Markets,” (with Lucas
Davis) Journal of Law and Economics, 55(1), February 2012.“The Redistributional Impact of Nonlinear Electricity Pricing,” American Economic Journal:
Economic Policy, 4(3), August 2012.“Career Concerns, Inaction and Market Inefficiency: Evidence from utility regulation,” (with
Meghan Busse and Ryan Kellogg), Journal of Industrial Economics, 60(2), June 2012.“Effective and Equitable Adoption of Opt-In Residential Dynamic Electricity Pricing,” Review
of Industrial Organization, 42(2), March 2013, 127-160.“The Incidence of an Oil Glut: Who Benefits from Cheap Crude Oil in the Midwest?” (with
Ryan Kellogg) Energy Journal, 35(1), January 2014.“A Microeconomic Framework for Evaluating Energy Efficiency Rebound And Some Implications,” Energy Journal, forthcoming January 2015.
“Markets for Anthropogenic Carbon Within the Larger Carbon Cycle,” in The Design and
Implementation of U.S. Carbon Policy, Don Fullerton and Catherine Wolfram eds., National
Bureau of Economic Research and University of Chicago Press, 2012.“Making the Wrong Case for Renewable Energy,” Bloomberg Business Class, February 13, 2012.
“The U.S. Can’t Control the World Oil Markets,” U.S. News & World Report, Debate Club,
March 2, 2012.“Why the U.S. Airlines Need to Adapt to a Slow-Growth Future,” Bloomberg Business Class,
June 4, 2012.“Seeking a fix for Californias gasoline market problems,” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2012.
“How Airline Markets Work...Or Do They?” (with Nancy Rose), in N. Rose ed., EconomicRegulation and Its Reform: What Have We Learned?, University of Chicago Press, 2014.
