Professor Christopher R. Knittel

Bio

Christopher Knittel is the Associate Dean for Climate and Sustainability and the George P. Shultz Professor of Energy Economics in the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He directs the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. CEEPR, established in 1977, is the hub for social science work related to energy and the environment at MIT. He is also the director of MIT’s new Climate Policy Center. Finally, along with Meredith Fowlie at UC Berkeley, he co-directs the Environmental and Energy Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the former co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics, and an associate editor of the Journal of Transportation Economics and Policy and Journal of Energy Markets. 

Knittel’s research studies consumer and firm decision-making and what this means for the benefits and costs of environmental and energy policy. He often interacts with policy-makers to discuss his research findings and the current research needs of policy. His current work involves studying how the costs of climate change policy vary across households and firms and how this differs across policy choices. Knittel uses a variety of empirical methods for his research, including large-scale randomized control trials, machine learning techniques, and structural models. Professor Knittel received his B.A. in economics and political science from the California State University, Stanislaus in 1994, an M.A. in economics from UC Davis in 1996, and a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1999.