Akshaya Jha
Assistant Professor Carnegie Mellon University
- Pittsburgh PA
Akshaya Jha’s research interests lie at the intersection of energy and environmental economics and industrial organization.
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Media Appearances
Coal-fired generating capacity is likely to keep declining, despite the President's order boosting coal
Marketplace online
2025-04-18
Trump's recent executive orders are designed to make coal easier to use. But Akshaya Jha (Heinz College) says it’s not enough to reverse the decline of coal in this country.
How Trump's executive order on coal could impact energy use in the US
ABC News online
2025-04-10
Trump's quest to conduct a resurgence of coal production and utilization is unlikely, according to energy experts. Akshaya Jha (Heinz College) says coal-fired power plants are aging and require substantial investments, plus natural gas and renewable energy sources have become more cost-effective than coal.
State Department says it will stop publishing global air pollution data
NPR radio
2025-03-07
Akshaya Jha (Heinz College) was mentioned as a co-author in a study with Deakin University in Australia that found an average 10% drop in air pollutants in cities with air pollution monitors. They found this could save the State Department nearly $1,500 per diplomat per year because they are paid a hardship differential (living in conditions worse than the U.S.). Deakin University said the program pays for itself.
US State Department Kills Global Air Monitoring Program Researchers Say Paid for Itself
Wired online
2025-03-05
The U.S. State Department is ending its global air quality monitoring program due to budget constraints. A 2022 study co-authored by Akshaya Jha (Heinz College) found it prevented up to 895 premature deaths and saved $465 million in medical costs per city annually.
Why it might be hard for Trump to reverse Biden’s offshore oil ban
Marketplace online
2025-01-07
Biden can make this declaration thanks to a 70-year-old law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.
“It grants the president the power to withdraw certain areas from offshore gas, oil and gas development,” explained Akshaya Jha, who teaches economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
Unlike a regular executive order, “there isn’t a clear mechanism for how a subsequent president can kind of reverse that decision,” he said.
By 2025, coal will no longer be the main way to generate the world’s electricity
Marketplace online
2022-12-08
And legislation passed this year in Congress could accelerate those trends even more, said Akshaya Jha at Carnegie Mellon University.
“So the Inflation Reduction Act has the potential to bring, bring that sort of innovation for other products that we currently don’t think of as being cost effective,” Jha said.
US embassies may have accidentally improved air quality
Ars Technica online
2022-10-28
Something unexpected happened in each of the cities in which the monitors appeared. Researchers found that, overall, air quality improved in the cities where embassies were tweeting out air-quality data. “We were surprised,” Akshaya Jha, assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the paper’s authors, told Ars.
Real-time air quality monitoring can save lives
Earth.com online
2022-10-26
“Poor air quality is a leading cause of premature death worldwide, responsible for one out of every nine deaths,” said study lead author Akshaya Jha, an assistant professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon. “Sharing credible air quality information can highlight this issue and have huge health and economic benefits that far outweigh the costs of the monitoring technology.”
Is Putin's War Pushing World Toward Nuclear Energy?
Newsweek online
2022-07-09
Assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University Akshaya Jha, who co-authored a paper on Germany's shift away from nuclear energy, told Newsweek that the question might not be one of economic viability, but of political will. And that paradigm shift, he added, is likely still a long time coming, going hand-in-hand with the broader adoption of other renewable energy sources.
How real-time data can curb air pollution and save more lives
The Mandarin online
2022-10-28
One of the study co-authors, Dr Akshaya Jha from Carnegie Mellon University, said poor air quality was a leading cause of premature death worldwide, being responsible for one out of every nine deaths.
Media
Social
Industry Expertise
Accomplishments
Editor’s Choice in January 2022 for “Regulatory Induced Risk Aversion"
2022
Campbell Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution at Stanford University
2023
Undergraduate Economics Program Academic Achievement Award
2009
Winner of the USAEE Young Professional Research Competition
2021
Heinz College Martcia Wade Teaching Award
2023
Education
Carnegie Mellon University
B.S.
Economics and Statistics
Stanford University
Ph.D.
Economics
Links
Event Appearances
Keeping The Lights On Is Harder Than You Think: President Biden’s Energy Policy
(2022) Trillion Dollar Questions Heinz College
Articles
External costs of transporting petroleum products: evidence from shipments of crude oil from North Dakota by pipelines and rail
The Energy Journal2019
Using data for crude oil transported out of North Dakota in 2014, this paper constructs new estimates of the air pollution, greenhouse gas, and spill and accident costs from long-distance movement of petroleum products by rail and pipelines. Our analysis has three main findings. First, air pollution and greenhouse gas costs are nearly twice as large for rail as for pipelines. Second, air pollution and greenhouse gas costs are much larger than estimates of spill and accidents costs. Third, air pollution and greenhouse gas costs of transporting fuel by rail and pipelines are one-fifth to one-tenth of the costs of combusting fuel in motor vehicles.
Considering the nuclear option: Hidden benefits and social costs of nuclear power in the US since 1970
Resource and Energy Economics2020
Although burning fossil fuels has environmental consequences, many countries have switched away from nuclear power in favor of fossil-fuel fired electricity production after incidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. This study estimates the substitution between nuclear and fossil-fuel fired electricity generation in the United States. Using an event-study framework, we leverage nuclear plant openings from 1970 to 1995 and forced nuclear plant outages from 1999 to 2014. Plant openings (nuclear outages) reduce (increase) monthly net coal-fired generation by approximately 200 GWh, implying a considerable reduction (increase) in emissions.
Regulatory Induced Risk Aversion in Coal Contracting at US Power Plants: Implications for Environmental Policy
Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists2022
Seminal work argues that electric utilities sign long-term contracts with coal suppliers prior to making relationship-specific investments in order to avoid the possibility of ex post hold-up. This paper provides empirical evidence that risk aversion also plays an important role in the coal contracting behavior of US power plants. Specifically, I show that plants facing more spot coal price uncertainty sign longer duration coal contracts, purchase contract coal from a larger number of origin counties, and pay higher contract coal prices. One plausible mechanism for this risk aversion is that regulators are less likely to incorporate high input cost realizations into the regulated output price they set for electric utilities.
The private and external costs of Germany’s nuclear phase-out
Journal of the European Economic Association2022
Many countries have phased out nuclear power in response to concerns about nuclear waste and the risk of nuclear accidents. This paper examines the shutdown of more than half of the nuclear production capacity in Germany after the Fukushima accident in 2011. We use hourly data on power plant operations and a machine learning approach to estimate the impacts of the phase-out policy. We find that reductions in nuclear electricity production were offset primarily by increases in coal-fired production and net electricity imports. Our estimates of the social cost of the phase-out range from €3 to €8 billion per year. The majority of this cost comes from the increased mortality risk associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels
Can forward commodity markets improve spot market performance? Evidence from wholesale electricity
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy2023
Forward markets are believed to aggregate information about future spot prices and reduce the cost of producing the commodity. We develop a measure of the extent to which forward and spot prices agree in markets with transaction costs. Using this measure, we show that day-ahead prices better reflect real-time prices at all locations in California’s electricity market after the introduction of financial trading. We then present evidence suggesting that operating costs and input fuel use fell after the introduction of financial trading on days when the nonconvexities inherent to the production and transmission of electricity are especially relevant.
