Faculty Affiliate Spotlight: Kelsey Jack
April 24, 2025
The most recent faculty member to join the Energy Institute is Kelsey Jack. Kelsey joined the faculty of the Haas School of Business in 2024 as an Associate Professor in the Business and Public Policy group. She came to Berkeley from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before that Kelsey was a faculty member at Tufts University. She also co-chairs the Environment and Energy sector at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT (J-PAL). Kelsey discussed the experiences that brought her to focus her research career on natural resources and development:
What led you to become an energy and environmental economist?
My “origin story” goes back to when I was twelve. I took a trip with my parents to Madagascar and saw some things that blew my 12-year old mind. It was simultaneously seeing some of the most unique ecosystems, just these incredible forests and animals, and also the worst poverty. Subsistence for very poor rural households was through clearing the forest for agriculture in order to feed their families. I didn’t know how to think about it, what was right and wrong. I got really interested in the balance between economic development and environmental conservation needs. That is what I have worked on ever since. I am an environmental economist and a development economist. I’m really interested in how these two topics and challenges come together.
What brought you to UC Berkeley and the Energy Institute?
I spent a sabbatical at Berkeley in 2013 and 2014. While I was visiting Berkeley I was just starting to do some energy research and Severin Borenstein said, “why don’t you come join our Energy Institute lunches?” I started going to the lunches and was really amazed by the warm and welcoming community, even for somebody who knew absolutely nothing about wholesale dispatch order or many other energy topics. I was really taken by the welcome and feel very lucky to be back here as a member of the community.
How would you describe your overall research focus?
My research is at the intersection of environmental economics and development economics. I’m interested in how people make decisions and how their actions affect others and the environment. I mostly work in Africa and other low- and middle-income countries. My work is very broadly on natural resources, how people use resources and how the natural environment affects people. I have some work on energy, some on water, some on land use. I work a lot with farmers to try to understand the choices that they’re making and the apparent tradeoffs between environmental objectives and livelihood needs. A lot of my work involves field experiments that test whether policies will change behavior. I value being able to not just sit in my office and look at numbers, but actually go out into the world to try to understand the particular policy challenges and decision making challenges.
What is one research project you are most proud of?
Several years ago I was in Cape Town, South Africa and learned about a project of the municipal government to switch a large number of households from postpaid meters to prepaid meters. With these prepaid meters you buy electricity credit, you load it onto the meter and you use electricity until you hit a balance of zero and your lights go out. A South African collaborator and I convinced the Cape Town electricity department to randomize the rollout of the new meters. We estimated the impact and saw very large decreases in electricity use when households were switched to a prepaid meter. Households who otherwise were paying their bills late were affected the most. We also found the payoff for the utility was fairly fast. Utilities in many parts of Africa or South Asia describe that they’re often facing a tradeoff of choosing whether or not to connect a new household to the electricity grid. If it’s a household that they think may not pay their bills, they may be less inclined to do so. With a prepaid electricity meter, it becomes much less risky to expand the grid to households that are low income. In addition to getting attention, the project created a long-run partnership with the City of Cape Town. We recently launched an embedded lab in the city government to do policy experiments.
Finally, what’s an ongoing project that you’re excited about?
In Ghana most households cook with charcoal or firewood, which is very damaging for human health. It also releases black carbon, an important greenhouse gas. The main alternative, clean energy source for cooking that’s viable at scale is liquid petroleum gas (LPG). However, getting a household to switch from cooking with biomass to cooking with LPG is extremely challenging. Existing donor-driven programs to subsidize LPG stoves are not effective because it’s really difficult for low income households to save up for the big cylinders of LPG that the stoves require. We are doing experiments to study how these programs can better target the households that are most likely to use the stoves.