06/23/2026

Academic Focus: Todd Gerarden

USAEE NEWSLETTER | SPRING 2026

I am an Associate Professor at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, part of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. At Cornell, I have taught classes in energy economics, environmental economics, and business analytics. Before that, I received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Virginia and a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University. My research studies how firms, consumers, and governments together shape the energy transition: how innovation happens, how clean-energy markets develop, and where well-intentioned interventions succeed or fall short. I have presented my work to academics and practitioners from organizations including the USITC, IMF, OECD, WTO, and World Bank. I have been an active member of USAEE since 2014.

Recently, I’ve been studying the impacts of U.S. import tariffs on Chinese solar panels in joint work with Bryan Bollinger (Dartmouth), Ken Gillingham (Yale, NBER), and Daniel Xu (Duke, NBER). We use production and sales data from the solar industry to understand how the tariffs affected firms, consumers, government revenue, and the environment. The most surprising thing we learned is that while tariffs were harmful to the U.S., a domestic manufacturing subsidy could improve both U.S. and global economic outcomes, because the environmental benefits of more solar deployment outweigh the potential production distortions from subsidizing manufacturing in a high-cost location.

In "Induced Innovation, Inventors, and the Energy Transition", joint with Eugenie Dugoua (London School of Economics), we explore how energy prices, market forces, and government interventions shape innovation in clean electricity technologies. We used worldwide patent application data to study how changes in natural gas prices in different countries affect the number of inventors working on clean electricity technology and the number of patents they produce. We found that prior advances in clean energy technology have been driven roughly equally by established inventors and new entrants, but that experienced inventors are more responsive to fossil fuel prices than new inventors. This finding reinforces the rationale for policies to expand the scientific workforce and subsidize research and development.

I am building on both of these projects now to study the broader impacts of industrial policy and innovation policy in the energy sector.

Todd Gerarden (https://toddgerarden.com) is an Associate Professor at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.