Contributor : Profile

Louis Preonas is Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, at the University of Maryland, College Park.

He is an energy and environmental economist, and much of his research focusses on interacting market distortions in US energy markets. His recent work studies market power in US coal transportation, and analyses the extent to which decreasing coal markups may lead to incomplete pass-through of a carbon tax. He is currently working to quantify the extent to which the decline of the US coal sector is causing carbon emissions to leak out of the country via coal exports.

His research also includes work at the intersection of environmental and development economics, focussing on the economic impacts of electricity access in the developing world. This work focusses on many points along the electricity supply chain in India, including generation, dispatch, transmission, and both rural and urban end-uses. In related research, a new working paper investigates the extent to which blackouts in developing countries are driven by a combination of utilities’ discretion and misallocation of generation.

Currently, he is developing a research agenda at the intersection of energy, water, and agriculture. A recent working paper combines (i) detailed electricity data for California farmers, (ii) detailed technical audits for 12,000 agricultural groundwater pumps, (iii) high-frequency measurements of groundwater depth, and (iv) satellite-derived measures of crop cover – in order to estimate how changes in the cost of pumping groundwater impact both agricultural groundwater use and cropping decisions.