Hi! My name is Nick Roy and I am an economist focused on climate policy in the United States. My work has primarily focused on power sector decarbonization and I have a general background in international trade and transportation research. I’ll be applying to graduate programs this upcoming cycle to start a PhD in Economics or Public Policy in Fall 2025. Currently, I am a Research Associate at Resources for the Future (RFF). Here I have developed and utilized the Haiku Electricity Market Model to analyze climate policy. This website serves as a collection of my work thus far, and as a home for future additions. Below is a brief narrative of the topics I have studied with links to related products.

Federal Climate Policy

My work at RFF initiated with the development of federal climate policy in 2021-2022. I started by working broadly on the development of federal climate policy options under budget reconciliation by first analyzing potential components of the Build Back Better package and as time progressed, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). These two pieces that I was lead author on were the most syndicated published work from RFF in 2021 and 2022 respectively. After the passage of the IRA, I led a larger modeling effort to examine the financial incidence and health implications of the new law. In 2023, we partnered with other lead modelers to publish two multimodel analyses of the legislation examing economy wide and power sector specific impacts of the bill.

The work we did to rapidly analyze constantly evolving legislative proposals in congress birthed the Carbon Scoring Project at RFF. We are currently working on developing a rigorous yet replicable modeling process to estimate the emissions and budgetary impacts of climate policy as it moves forth. The goal of this project is to show how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) or a similiar nonpartisan institution could rapidly analyze the impacts of proposed legislation for future efforts. This process could also be used to analyze the budgetary impacts of executive regulation such as power plant or fuel efficiency rules under the Clean Air Act. This project is a joy because it builds an institutional legacy of the work we did to inform decision makers on the economic and climate implictions of their decisions.

State Climate Policy

When I first started as an analyst in 2020, comprehensive federal climate action was mostly off the table and my team was mostly researching policies for states to decarbonize their economies. We focused primarily on carbon markets and their impact on the power sector but since the passage of the IRA, we have launched efforts to expand the policy set and sectoral scope of our work. Earlier in 2023, we published a report that considered the role of facility cpecific emissions caps in California’s cap-and-trade program. We wrote a magazine article on the matter and presented this work to the Environmental Justice Advisory Council for the cap-and-trade program in the fall. We learned a lot about the challenges and exciting ideas that arise from integrating environmental justice into the policy design of market-based mechanisms.

We then moved to look more broadly at the market design of the program as CARB has indicated it might change some components in upcoming rulemaking. I expanded our power sector optimization model to include emissions abatement and electrification from other sectors in order to simulate different futures for the program. We submitted abbreviated comments of our upcoming report on the matter in December 2023.

Undergraduate Work (Heavy Duty Trucking)

Prior to RFF I was a student at California State University of Long Beach. I graduated with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics, a B.A. in Mathematical Economic Theory, and a minor in Philosophy. The city of Long Beach’s economic heart is the Port of Long Beach making the city a rich research area for matters on heavy duty trucking. During my studies, I researched port drayage disruptions my senior year at the Center for International Trade and Transportation (CITT). The summer before I interned at RFF studying heavy duty trailer energy efficiency device adoption. To enhance my analytical capabailities I took graduate coursework in Regression Analysis, Calculus of Variations, Advanced Microeconomic Theory, Research Methods, and Econometrics. My work at CITT and RFF gave me useful background knowledge that I would later use to assist in the devleopment of RFF’s MHDV decarbonization model.

Before I developed my passion for research, I interned at Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses fostering local economic development. I moved deeper into my studies and began to tutor mathematics and teach freshman organizational skills as a peer mentor and tutor. As President of the Economics Student Association, I found plenty of opportunities to mentor students and build community in our department. I am still involved with the organization today and annually host a workshop on environmental economics as well as restarting the alumni mentorship program. To me, one of the better aspects of research is the community that develops in academic and research institutions. At RFF, I continued this passion for community by helping organize the summer intern program at RFF for 2022 and 2023. I enjoy paying forward the valuable mentorship I receive and hope that remains a consistent thread in my career.

Future Research

Through my experiences I’ve become increasingly interested in the intersection of climate policy and trade. Whether it is the complexities of global trade, the distribution of environmental externalities from trucking, how carbon markets expand or add jurisdictions to their regulations, or the fascinating complexity of power markets; trade remains an important element in all of these issues. Working closely on the development of the IRA, it became clear that the biggest constraint on addressing global greenhouse gas emissions is the quickly evolving post-neoliberal era of trade. Even the second order effects of globalization on labor and technological development are shaping the policy mechanisms chosen for decarbonization. One way this has already shaped climate policy is in the revitalization of industrial policy in the US. Domestically, trade is just as relevant as the binding constraint for decarbonization is the development of transmission capacity to flow power across multiple communities with different rules and attitudes towards new infrastructure.

Where I find analyzing trade to not be just a matter of what constrains decarbonization, but what can still enable it is in my work on carbon markets. The US already has several subnational carbon markets, some economy wide, others just for the power sector. As states look to unify, compete, and capitalize on federal incentives from the IRA, emissions trading programs become a powerful mechanism. I’d hope that carbon markets continue to expand and evolve to leverage regionally specific concerns of equity, costs, and resource availability. If the future leads to more carbon markets in and outside of the US, questions of linking with exchange rates will create a flourishing set of questions that a young economist could craft a research agenda after. Carbon markets also provide more information and data about emissions in the economy and allow for better analysis of climate policy more broadly.

The tools of economics are more useful than ever as many of these issues can be studied through the subfields of industrial organization, political economy, international trade, and energy economics. I hope that my work in a doctorate program will pull forward the thread across my experiences with a supportive research community alongside me.