Nicholas Burger is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation and director of RAND's Washington office. His work focuses on environmental economics and international development, including energy and climate change. He was a lead author on the Fourth Assessment Report produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. At RAND, Burger has co-authored a report on designing viable climate change policies and estimated the costs of renewable energy. He recently completed a three-year randomized control trial to evaluate a farmer training program in China that is designed to reduce negative environmental impacts of farming. He was part of a team that contributed analysis to the first Quadrennial Energy Review through the Department of Energy.
Burger's other international development work includes studying constraints to growth of the private health sector in sub-Saharan Africa and evaluating one of Indonesia's major community-driven development anti-poverty programs. He led a team that assessed ways to relax constraints to growth for small and medium sized enterprises in Indonesia, and he recently completed an analysis of innovative affordable housing models in India. He has also work with the Department of Defense to develop and execute efforts to evaluate U.S. security assistance.
Burger received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Selected Publications
Burger, Nicholas, Daniel Kopf, Connor P. Spreng, Joanne Yoong, and Neeraj Sood, "Healthy Firms: Constraints to Growth Among Private Health Sector Facilities in Ghana and Kenya," PLoS ONE, 7(2), 2012
Crane, Keith, Nicholas Burger, and Martin Wachs, "Putting a Tax on Oil," Public Works Management Policy, 17(3), 2012
Burger, Nicholas, Gary Charness, and John Lynhamc, "Field and Online Experiments on Self-Control," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 77, 2011
Sood, Neeraj, Nicholas Burger, Joanne Yoong, Dan Kopf, and Connor Spreng, "Firm-Level Perspectives on Public Sector Engagement with Private Healthcare Providers: Survey Evidence from Ghana and Kenya," PLoS ONE, 6(11), 2011
Crane, Keith, Aimee E. Curtright, David S. Ortiz, Constantine Samaras, Nicholas Burger, "The Economic Costs of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions under a U.S. National Renewable Electricity Mandate," Energy Policy, 39, 2011
Burger, Nicholas, and John Lynham, "Betting on Weight Loss... and Losing: Personal Gambles as Commitment Mechanisms," Applied Economics Letters, 17(2), 2010
Burger, Nicholas, and Daniel T. Kaffine, "Gas Prices, Traffic, and Freeway Speeds in Los Angeles," The Review of Economics and Statistics, 91(3), 2009
Kotchen, Matthew J., and Nicholas Burger, "Should We Drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? An Economic Perspective," Energy Policy, 35, 2007
