October - December 1998 Issue


News Items, October - December 1998

Richard L. Schmalensee, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR), has been named the seventh dean of the Sloan School of Management. Professor Schmalensee is the Gordon Y Billard Professor of Economics and Management at Sloan. His research focuses on industrial organization, regulation, and managerial economics; environmental policy; and electric utility industry structure and regulation. He is a noted expert on emissions trading and issues of global change. He served on the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House under President George Bush and also on the Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Economic Advisory Committee, chairing its Advisory Council on Clean Air Act Compliance Analysis.

On November 19-20, the CEEPR held its fall workshop. Topics included experience with new electricity markets in California and the Midwest; the long-term evolution of energy prices; technology in climate change policy; coal productivity; nitrogen oxides emission reduction and trading under Title IV; and carbon dioxide/energy income elasticities. Attendees included 77 representatives from industry, government, and academia. Guest speakers were James M. Poterba, Mitsui Professor of Economics at MIT, who discussed the changing composition of retirement saving in the United States, and Kevin Cook of the US House Commerce Committee, who discussed energy and environmental issues in the 106th Congress.

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Herbert H. Einstein has received the Muller Award from the International Society for Rock Mechanics (ISRM), a professional society with 5,500 members from 42 nations. Professor Einstein, who received the award "in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the profession of rock mechanics and rock engineering," will deliver the Muller Lecture at the 1999 ISRM Congress in Paris. Professor Einstein participates in Energy Laboratory research on geoengineering for energy recovery and is asso-ciated with the National Advanced Drilling and Excavation Technologies Program.