About

Katrina K. Jessoe is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis, specializing in environmental, resource, and energy economics. Her research primarily focuses on the design and evaluation of pricing and conservation policies within the water and electricity sectors. She frequently collaborates with electric and water utilities as well as state agencies to conduct her research. Her recent and ongoing projects include a framed field experiment to understand the water and energy impacts of water conservation instruments, estimating the price elasticity of demand for agricultural groundwater and land use, designing water markets, studying the impacts of environmental change on externalities in common pool resources, and analyzing the effects of time-variant electricity pricing in the agricultural sector. In addition to her research, Jessoe serves as a co-editor for the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and is a member of the Board of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University in 2002 and completed her PhD in Environmental and Resource Economics at Yale University in 2009.

Research topics

• Microeconomics
• Economics
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Natural resource economics
• Business
• Ecology
• Environmental science
• Environmental economics
• Water resource management
• Environmental resource management
• Engineering
• Biology
• Agricultural economics

Selected publications

• Externalities of climate adaptation in common-pool groundwater resources

  Journal of Public Economics · 2026-02-26

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Externalities of climate adaptation in common-pool groundwater resources

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-02-26

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  © This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Deposited by shareyourpaper.org and openaccessbutton.org. We've taken reasonable steps to ensure this content doesn't violate copyright. However, if you think it does you can request a takedown by emailing help@openaccessbutton.org.

  PublisherDOI

• Externalities of climate adaptation in common-pool groundwater resources

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-02-26

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  © This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Deposited by shareyourpaper.org and openaccessbutton.org. We've taken reasonable steps to ensure this content doesn't violate copyright. However, if you think it does you can request a takedown by emailing help@openaccessbutton.org.

  PublisherDOI

• Price sensitivity to precipitation and water storage in California

  Nature Sustainability · 2025-10-21 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Designing water markets for climate change adaptation

  Nature Climate Change · 2024-03-28 · 6 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• AMI water meters deliver end-use water and financial savings in leaky households: experimental evidence from California

  Environmental Research Letters · 2024-09-17 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) for residential water consumption is exploding globally giving water utilities the ability to improve their water tracking, billing, and distribution systems’ leak detection. With AMI, utilities have also gained the opportunity to provide real-time high-resolution water consumption information to their customers to induce conservation. Using a randomized controlled trial we find that on average homes that install AMI and receive conservation based messaging significantly reduce water consumption by 5.24 gallons per household per day beyond savings already obtained from home water reports. Of the estimated water savings we attribute 92.8% to leak reduction. While the payback period from the deployment of AMI meters and treatment in all homes is over 41 years, homes that experience leaks realize financial savings of $60/year and a treatment payback period of four years. This is because treatment did not induce water or financial savings in homes without leaks. These findings indicate that even on top of existing conservation programs, AMI messaging that targets end-user leaks could result in significant water savings, economic benefits to end-users, and advance conservation goals.

  PublisherDOI

• The Dynamic Impacts of Pricing Groundwater

  Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists · 2023-12-04 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper evaluates own-price dynamics in taxing environmental externalities. We exploit a natural experiment that exposed some firms to a large and persistent price increase for groundwater, a setting characterized by incomplete markets. Using five years of post-treatment data on farm-level water use, we find that water conservation doubles between the first and fifth year of the tax. Failure to account for dynamics in policies designed to manage groundwater will mischaracterize the price elasticity of demand and introduce efficiency costs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Untapped potential: leak reduction is the most cost-effective urban water management tool

  Environmental Research Letters · 2022-02-14 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Providing sufficient, safe, and reliable drinking water is a growing challenge as water supplies become more scarce and uncertain. Meanwhile, water utilities in the United States lose approximately 17% of their delivered water to leaks each year. Using data from over 800 utilities across four U.S. states, California, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas, we characterize the heterogeneity in water losses across the U.S., develop a model to assess the economically efficient level of losses, and use this model to compare the net benefits of several proposed water loss regulations and modeling approaches. Combining economic and engineering principles, our model shows that for the median utility, it is economically efficient to reduce water losses by 34.7%, or 100 acre-feet (AF) per year. The median cost of water savings from leak management is $277/AF, which falls well below the cost of traditional water management tools. However, the optimal level of water losses strongly depends on utility-specific characteristics, leading to large differences in the potential for cost-effective leak reduction across utilities. We show that water loss management can lead to water savings that generate net economic benefits, but only if management approaches incorporate economic and engineering principles.

  PublisherDOI

• Assessing Data Adequacy for Determining Utility-Specific Water Loss Reduction Standards

  Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management · 2021-06-02 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  In 2017, urban water retailers in California reported 364 million m3 in real water losses within their distribution systems, representing on average 7.12% of their total water delivered that year. Recognizing the value of these water losses, the California State Water Resource Control Board (SWRCB) has proposed setting economic water loss reduction standards—regulatory water loss levels—that are individually tailored based on utility-specific data. Our research analyzed data sets currently available to the SWRCB, including water audits and electronic annual reports, as well as supplemental data collected by utilities to determine if the information currently available is adequate for creating individually tailored water loss reduction regulations. Adequacy was evaluated based on the data’s completeness, validity scores, and consistency. We found that, given the current state of the data, the resulting standards may not be representative of individual utilities and that annual data variability may be greater than a proposed reduction. It is recommended that entities considering similar individual water loss reduction targets consider timing, the data collection tool, and data selection when developing utility-specific real loss reduction policy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Missing markets: Evidence on agricultural groundwater demand from volumetric pricing

  Journal of Public Economics · 2021 · 24 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Natural resource economics
  • Agricultural economics
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Frank J. Loge

  Tecnológico de Monterrey

  21 shared

• Gabriel Lade

  Macalester College

  18 shared

• Edward Spang

  University of California, Davis

  18 shared

• David Rapson

  9 shared

• Ellen Bruno

  8 shared

• Maya Papineau

  4 shared

• Sheila M. Olmstead

  4 shared

• Amanda M. Rupiper

  4 shared

Education

• B.A., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

  Princeton University

  2002

• Other, Environmental Science & Management, Specialization Environmental Economics

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  2004

• Ph.D., Environmental and Natural Resource Economics

  Yale University

  2009