Lucas

Research Expertise and Interest

energy markets, environmental economics, applied microeconomics, public finance, industrial organization

Research Description

Lucas Davis received a B.A. from Amherst College in 1996 and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin in 2005. Prior to joining Haas in 2009, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on energy and environmental markets, and in particular, on electricity and natural gas regulation, pricing in competitive and non-competitive markets, and the economic and business impacts of environmental policy. His work appears in leading academic journals including the American Economic Review, the RAND Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Political Economy.

Featured in the Media

Please note: The views and opinions expressed in these articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or positions of UC Berkeley.
January 6, 2021

The Steady Rise of Electricity For Home Heating

Axios
Ben Geman
A new working paper from UC Berkeley business professor Lucas Davis charts the share of U.S. homes that use electricity as their main heating source. It went from 1% in 1950 to almost 40% by 2018. The paper, using Census data, maps the trend through the decades. Going electric for heating and other equipment that now use oil or gas, paired with an increasingly low-carbon power mix, is a tool against global warming.
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September 4, 2018

How Oil Bosses Make Their Own Luck

Washington Post
Liam Denning, Bloomberg

Between 1992 and 2016, the compensation of oil company CEOs rose by 2 percent for every 10 percent increase in oil prices, according to a new study co-authored by business professor Lucas Davis, faculty director of Berkeley's Energy Institute at Haas. The statistical analysis looked at the compensation of 934 executives at 80 large exploration and production companies, finding a nearly one-for-one relationship between oil company valuation and the price of oil. The reporter writes: "Linking pay with share prices is widespread, of course, but more so in the oil business, where non-salary components accounted for more than 70 percent of compensation for the average executive in 2016; up from about 60 percent 20 years ago and higher than for virtually every other sector, according to the paper."

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