About

Reed Walker is the Transamerica Professor of Business Strategy and a Professor of Economics at the University of California Berkeley, Haas School of Business. He is affiliated with the Department of Economics and is involved in research related to business strategy and public policy. His contact information includes a phone number (510) 965-3298 and an email address rwalker@berkeley.edu. Additional details about his research focus, background, and key contributions are not provided in the page text.

Research topics

• Market economy
• Economics
• Political Science
• Geography
• Public economics
• Natural resource economics
• Microeconomics
• Environmental health
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Misperceptions About Air Pollution: Implications for Willingness to Pay and Environmental Inequality

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-08-01

  reportSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Is Air Pollution Regulation Too Lenient? Evidence from US Offset Markets

  American Economic Review · 2025-08-28 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author

  We develop a framework to estimate the marginal cost of air pollution regulation and apply it to assess policy efficiency. We exploit a provision of the Clean Air Act that requires new plants to pay incumbent facilities to reduce emissions. This “offset” policy creates hundreds of local pollution markets, differing by pollutant and location. Theory and transaction data suggest that offset prices reveal marginal abatement costs. We compare these prices to marginal benefits of pollution reduction estimated using leading air quality models and find that, on average, marginal benefits exceed marginal costs by more than a factor of ten. (JEL D61, H23, K32, Q52, Q53, Q58)

  PublisherDOI

• Misperceptions About Air Pollution: Implications for Willingness to Pay and Environmental Inequality

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Income, Wealth, and Environmental Inequality in the United States

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-10-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  This paper explores the relationships between air pollution, income, and wealth by combining administrative data from U.S. tax returns between 1979-2016, various measures of air pollution, and sociodemographic information from linked survey and administrative data.Historically, the relationship between income and ambient pollution levels nationally is approximately zero for both non-Hispanic White and Black individuals.However, at every single percentile of the national income distribution, Black individuals are exposed to, on average, higher levels of air pollution than White individuals.By 2016, the relationship between income and air pollution had steepened, primarily for Black individuals, driven by changes in where rich and poor Black individuals live.We utilize quasi-random shocks to income to examine the causal effect of changes in income and wealth on pollution exposure over a five year horizon, finding that these income-pollution elasticities map closely to the values implied by our descriptive patterns.We calculate that Black-White differences in income can explain 10 percent of the observed gap in air pollution levels in 2016.

  PublisherDOI

• The Changing Nature of Pollution, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2024-05-01 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author

  This paper uses tax records linked to administrative Census data and high-resolution measures of air pollution exposure (PM2.5) to study the evolution of the Black-White pollution exposure gap since 1984. We decompose changes in the racial exposure gap into (i) rank-preserving compression of the pollution distribution and (ii) changes stemming from a reordering of Black and White households within the pollution distribution. We find a narrowing of the racial exposure gap that is overwhelmingly driven by rank-preserving changes rather than positional changes. Recently, however, the relative positions of Black and White households in the upper tail of the pollution distribution have converged.

  PublisherDOI

• Income, Wealth, and Environmental Inequality in the United States

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Income, Wealth, and Environmental Inequality in the United States

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Changing Nature of Pollution, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  This paper uses administrative tax records linked to Census demographic data and high-resolution measures of fine small particulate (PM2.5)exposure to study the evolution of the Black-White pollution exposure gap over the past 40 years.In doing so, we focus on the various ways in which income may have contributed to these changes using a statistical decomposition.We decompose the overall change in the Black-White PM2.5 exposure gap into (1) components that stem from rank-preserving compression in the overall pollution distribution and (2) changes that stem from a reordering of Black and White households within the pollution distribution.We find a significant narrowing of the Black-White PM2.5 exposure gap over this time period that is overwhelmingly driven by rank-preserving changes rather than positional changes.However, the relative positions of Black and White households at the upper end of the pollution distribution have meaningfully shifted in the most recent years.

  PublisherDOI

• The Changing Nature of Pollution, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Changing Nature of Pollution, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Early Childhood Environment and Adult Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from U.S. Administrative Data

  NSF · $453k · 2015–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Joseph Shapiro

  University of California, Berkeley

  116 shared

• Janet Currie

  Princeton University

  94 shared

• Emilia Simeonova

  70 shared

• Peter Nilsson

  68 shared

• Sharat Ganapati

  Georgetown University

  40 shared

• Maya Rossin‐Slater

  Stanford University

  13 shared

• Lucas W. Davis

  University of California, Berkeley

  10 shared

• Michael Greenstone

  University of Chicago

  10 shared