Research
Job Market Paper
Who Pays, Who Adopts? Efficiency and Equity of Residential Solar Policy
This paper studies the equilibrium outcomes of diverse residential solar subsidies within a nested discrete choice framework, introducing endogenous capacity choice and heterogeneous household preferences. I find solar subsidies have intensive effects and would motivate different sizes of solar panel installation. Furthermore, households respond heterogeneously to subsidies: switching from a subsidy based on future production to one that reduces upfront investment costs shifts solar photovoltaics adoption toward lower-income households. There is no single dominant policy in both cost-efficiency and equity. I propose a novel policy screening that is the most cost-efficient, but at the expense of equity. The method of raising subsidies also shapes distributional outcomes. These findings highlight the importance of subsidy policy design.
Selected Conferences: IAEE International 2025, EEA (August, 2025), IAEE ASSA (Jan, 2026).
Papers in Progress
Flexibility in Power System: Market Design Matters, with Bert Willems
The growing share of renewable energy requires sufficient investment in power system flexibility. In this paper, we frame a three-stage peak-load pricing model consisting of investment, commitment, and production, considering that electricity generation is costly to adjust on short notice. The results demonstrate the importance of increasing time granularity in electricity markets with efficient state-contingent prices. Adapting the idea of real options theory that waiting is valuable, flexible firms avoid producing in the low-demand state and earn a premium to recoup investment costs. On top of that, this paper discusses the efficiency of alternative market designs in the investment of flexible assets. In the absence of an efficient real-time market, day-ahead forward price results in under-investment in flexible technologies and over-investment in inflexible ones. This distortion, in theory, can be corrected by a time-varying options market with technology-specific payment while any centralized auction fails to achieve optimum. Finally, this work briefly illustrates the effect of demand flexibility, showing that an increase in demand response does not necessarily reduce the reliance on production flexibility if rationing is done randomly.
Selected Conferences: AIEE 2021, YEEES 2022, EEA 2023, CEEM PhD Conference 2023, CEA 2024.
Electricity Forward Premium: Renewable Integration and Skewness Preference, with Ronald Huisman and Bert Willems
There is mixed empirical evidence on the premiums that explain electricity forward prices. We argue that the growth of electricity supplied by renewable energy sources and the preference for skewness may provide an explanation. We extend an existing equilibrium model by incorporating these features. The model predicts that the influence of spot price variance and skewness on forward prices is undetermined, reconciling mixed empirical findings. In addition, we find additional premiums, related to the covariance and coskewness of renewable supply and spot prices, that explain the forward premium. We provide empirical support using data from the German power market.
Selected Conferences: Conference on Climate and Energy Finance 2023, FMA International 2025.
Reading Groups
Env.Climate Reading Group, co-organized with Hulai Zhang, Lishu Zhang, and Shengyu Li.
This weekly reading group discusses academic papers across topics including but not limited to Environmental and Energy Economics, as well as Sustainable Finance. Feel free to reach out to any of the organizers if you are interested.