May 2026 Update

I have had major changes in my professional life this year. In January, I stepped down as Co-Editor of Energy Economics after nine years. I’m grateful to Richard Tol for giving me the opportunity and for being so good to work with. I’ve not actually left the journal, but rather changed to the position of data editor. I believe this new position will allow me to have the greatest impact on the publication process.

Another major change is that I have stepped down from running the department’s graduate programs as of May 15. I served in that role for eight years, a period that included the pandemic. It was definitely time to let a member of the younger generation take the reins. Hugh Cassidy will bring new ideas and energy to the position.

I’m happy to have had both of those opportunities. Ultimately, however, I prefer to spend my time on research rather than lower-tier university administration. Most of the job of running graduate programs is enforcing rules and putting together GTA assignments and stuff like that. Eight years was way more than enough for me. The only way I’d ever consider an administrative position in the future is if it came with the power to make a real impact.

This has freed up a lot of time to catch up on reading papers I didn’t have time or energy to read since 2018. Mostly, this has been heterogeneous agent macro.

I have many research projects that were either never started or that were stalled due to my other commitments. There are no plans to add new projects until I get the backlog under control. In some cases, that will mean taking a hard look at the idea and making the decision that it’s no longer worth pursuing, and that’s okay.

I didn’t expect to be asked so many times if I would be taking time off this summer. I don’t know how common this is for faculty exiting administrative positions (it may be common or it may be specific to me) but I have no desire to take time off. The opportunity to read papers, write papers of my own, and work on research code is orders of magnitude more enjoyable than a vacation would be.

I’ll end this update with a comment on how my interests have changed over time. My research interest has always been consumption. In particular, how agents make consumption decisions when there is so much uncertainty about the future. That probably won’t be obvious to anyone that looks at my CV. But the dynamics of gasoline prices, inflation forecasting, and how inflation and economic activity respond to oil shocks are all important for consumption decisions. My interest in nonlinearity is motivated entirely by the consumption decision. It’s always seemed to me that a shock that hit in the late 1990s was completely different from the same shock hitting during the Great Recession. What’s changed is that I used to focus on purely empirical research, to a large extent reflecting the prominence of VAR models during my grad school days, but now I put more weight on theory. The reasoning behind that shift is a story for another day.