The Wallace E. Oates Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award Recipients

The Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award is judged by a panel of AERE members, and emphasizes originality of research, quality of implementation, expositional clarity, along with intellectual and practical significance of research findings.

2025

Owen Kay, Essays on Optimal Energy Policy, University of Michigan, 2025.

2024

Youngho (Young) Kim, Essays on the Design and Evaluation of Payments for Ecosystem Services Programs, University of Maryland, 2024.

2023

Rafael Araujo, The Economics of Amazon Deforestation: Drivers, Consequences, and Policies to Stop It, FGV EPGE Brazilian School of Economics and Finance, 2023.

2022

Charles A. Taylor, Essays on Land Use and Agriculture, Columbia University, 2022.

2021

Gabriel Englander, Empirical Essays on Natural Resource Exploitation, University of California, Berkeley, 2021.

2020

Katherine Wagner, Essays in Environmental Public Finance, Yale University, 2020.

2019

Akhil Rao, The Economics of Orbit Use: Theory, Policy, and Measurement, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2019.

2018

Louis Preonas, Three Essays on Energy Economics, University of California, Berkeley, 2018.

2017

Eyal Frank, "Economic Outcomes and Market Dynamics of Biodiversity Losses," Columbia University, 2017.

2016

Due to a change in the timing of award eligibility and selection, there was no 2016 doctoral dissertation awardee.

2015

Casey Wichman, "Information and Environmental Policy," University of Maryland, College Park, 2015.

2014

Kailin Kroetz, "The Costs of Restrictions in Tradeable Permit Programs," University of California, Davis, 2014.