About

Frank Wolak is the Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. He is also the Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford. His research and teaching focus on the design, performance, and monitoring of energy and environmental markets. Wolak has served as Chair of the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator and was a member of the Emissions Market Advisory Committee for California’s Market for Greenhouse Gas Emissions allowances. He holds positions as a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and at the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Environmental economics
• Engineering
• Natural resource economics
• Business
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Marketing
• Industrial organization

Selected publications

• Electric Vehicles and the Energy Transition: Unintended Consequences of Time-of-Use Pricing

  American Economic Review Insights · 2025-11-25 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  The growth of electric vehicles (EVs) raises new challenges for electricity systems. We implement a field experiment to assess the effect of time-of-use (TOU) pricing and managed charging on EV charging behavior. We find that while TOU pricing is effective at shifting EV charging into off-peak hours, it unintentionally induces new and larger “shadow peaks” of simultaneous charging. These shadow peaks lead to greater exceedance of local capacity constraints and advance the need for distribution network upgrades. In contrast, centrally managed charging solves the coordination problem, reducing transformer capacity requirements, and is well tolerated by consumers in our setting. (JEL C93, D91, L62, L94, Q42)

  PublisherDOI

• Take the Load Off: Time and Technology as Determinants of Electricity Demand Response

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Take the Load Off: Effort and Technology as Determinants of Electricity Demand Response

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-05-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  As electricity systems transition toward more variable renewable energy, flexible demand has emerged as a critical tool for grid management.Yet a fundamental question remains: are emerging smart technologies sufficient to unlock demand response, or does human behavior remain the critical barrier?Our field experiment examines this question through a novel approach that individually randomizes peak event timing for each participating household, allowing us to leverage both within-subject and between-subject variation.We compare the response to "peak events" on electricity consumption for households equipped with three distinct demand response programs: a fully automated system requiring no action; app-enabled smart devices requiring minimal effort; and traditional manual adjustments.The results are striking-households with passive, automated responses reduced consumption five times more than those required to take any action at all, even when the burden is greatly reduced via smart technology.The provision of enabling technologies alone made no difference in households' responsiveness, as compared to a fully manual setting, when active participation was still required.These findings reveal that the opportunity cost of time and effort-not technology limitations-may be the fundamental obstacle to unlocking electricity demand flexibility.To achieve its full potential, "smart home" technologies need to incorporate these behavioral realities as barriers to responsiveness.

  PublisherDOI

• Show Me the Money! A Field Experiment on Electric Vehicle Charge Timing

  American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2025-04-29 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  We use a field experiment to measure the effectiveness of financial incentives to shift the timing of electric vehicle (EV) charging. EV owners respond strongly to financial incentives, reducing charging during peak hours by 49 percent by shifting to off-peak hours. In contrast, a prosocial information treatment has no discernible effect. When financial incentives are removed, charge timing reverts to pre-intervention behavior, reinforcing that “money matters.” Our findings highlight the substantial flexibility of EV charging compared to other forms of electricity demand. Such flexibility has the potential to greatly reduce future electric system costs arising from a rapidly decarbonizing transportation sector. (JEL C93, D12, D91, L92, L94, Q48)

  PublisherDOI

• Measuring Market Power in Network-Constrained Markets

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-09-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Producers in locational pricing markets have the ability to exercise market power by impacting the extent to which transport capacity constraints bind.We extend the single-location residual demand curve concept to a residual demand hypersurface that quantifies the impact of a supplier's output change at one location on prices at all locations.This concept improves our ability to explain the offers suppliers submit in the Italian locational pricing electricity market and demonstrates why the locations of a firm's generation capacity determines the size and direction of locational price changes associated with the divestment of a fixed amount of generation capacity.

  PublisherDOI

• Measuring Market Power in Network-Constrained Markets

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• An Economic Perspective on the EPA’s Clean Power Plan — Cross-State Coordination Key to Cost-Effective CO₂ Reductions

  WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks · 2025-05-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Credible Numbers: A Procedure for Reporting Statistical Precision in Parameter Estimates

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-02-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Econometric software packages typically report a fixed number of decimal digits for coefficient estimates and their associated standard errors.This practice misses the opportunity to use rounding rules that convey statistical precision.Using insights from the testing statistical hypotheses of equivalence literature, we propose a methodology that only reports decimal digits in a parameter estimate that reject a hypothesis of statistical equivalence.Applying this methodology to all articles published in the American Economic Review between 2000 and 2022, we find that over 60% of the printed digits in coefficient estimates do not convey statistically meaningful information according to our definition of a significant digit.If one additional digit beyond the last significant digit is reported for each coefficient estimate, then approximately onethird of the printed digits in our sample would not be reported.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Electric Vehicles and the Energy Transition: Unintended Consequences of a Common Retail Rate Design

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-08-01 · 6 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  The growth of electric vehicles (EVs) raises new challenges for electricity systems. We implement a field experiment to assess the effect of time-of-use (TOU) pricing and managed charging on EV charging behavior. We find that while TOU pricing is effective at shifting EV charging into off-peak hours, it unintentionally induces new and larger “shadow peaks” of simultaneous charging. These shadow peaks lead to greater exceedance of local capacity constraints and advance the need for distribution network upgrades. In contrast, centrally managed charging solves the coordination problem, reducing transformer capacity requirements, and is well-tolerated by consumers in our setting.

  PublisherDOI

• Search with learning in the retail gasoline market

  The RAND Journal of Economics · 2024-06-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This article estimates a model of optimal search where consumers learn the distribution of gasoline prices during their driving trips. Our model incorporates traffic information and leverages this ordered search environment to recover parameters of the search and learning process using only station‐level price and market share data. We find that learning is a crucial component of search in this market. Consumers' prior beliefs regularly deviate from the true price distribution but are updated quickly following each new price observation. Counterfactuals reveal how these learning dynamics generate asymmetric search patterns commonly associated with asymmetric cost pass‐through .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James Bushnell

  25 shared

• Mark C. Thurber

  Stanford University

  16 shared

• Matthew S. Lewis

  Clemson University

  15 shared

• Severin Borenstein

  15 shared

• Robert H. Patrick

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  14 shared

• Robert W. Staiger

  13 shared

• Charles D. Kolstad

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  12 shared

• Ognen Stojanovski

  11 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Stanford University

  1985

• M.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1980

• B.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1977

Awards & honors

• Zale Lecture and Award