personnel profile

Research Statement

James (Jim) Sweeney, is Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency; Professor of Management Science and Engineering; Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research; Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace; and Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for International Studies. His professional activities focus on economic policy and analysis, particularly in energy, natural resources, and the environment.

At Stanford he has served as chairman of the Department of EnginProfessor James L. Sweeney is Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency, Professor of Management Science and Engineering, an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Economics, and a Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Until September 1999, he served as chairman of the Stanford Department of Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research.

He has focused his professional activities on the application of economics methods and mathematical modeling, particularly to natural resource issues, energy economics, environmental economics, competitive analysis, and policy analysis. He has conducted theoretical research on depletable and renewable resource use, environmental economics, gasoline market dynamics, energy tariff policy, and housing market dynamics. He has conducted empirical research on energy demand, electricity demand and financial forecasting, and geothermal energy market behavior. Along with Alan Kneese, he was editor of the three volume Handbook of Natural Resource and Energy Economics, part of the North Holland Handbooks in Economics series.

At Stanford he has served as the Director of the Energy Modeling Forum for seven years, the Chairman of the Institute for Energy Studies, and the Director of the Center for Economic Policy Research (now named the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research). He has served as coeditor of the Journal Resource and Energy Economics and serve on the editorial board of The Energy Journal. He was a founding member of the International Association for Energy Economics and has served as its vicepresident for publications. He has been a member of several committees of the National Research Council (the operating branch of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering) and until recently served on the Board on Energy and Environmental System. He is a Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology. He currently is a member of the review panel for the Public Interest Energy Research Program run by the state of California.

In the early 1970's he served as Director of the Office of Energy Systems Modeling and Forecasting of the U.S. Federal Energy Administration. In that role he was responsible for the development and the use of the energy supply and demand models used by the U.S. Federal government for its energy policy analysis and for its forecasting of energy supply and demand. He personally developed the structural/econometric model of gasoline demand used by that agency.

He periodically serves as a consultant or advisor to Exxon Corporation, ARCO, the American Petroleum Institute, Charles River Associates, Cornerstone Research, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Energy. He has served as an expert witness in a number of energy litigations in natural gas, oil, and electricity industries in the United States and in New Zealand.

For a complete list of Sweeney's publications, see his publications page.

Degree	Discipline	Year	School
PhD	Engineering Economic Systems	1971	Stanford University
BS	Electrical Engineering	-	Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Course Number	Course Title	Link
MS&E 243	Energy Policy Analysis
MS&E 246	Economics of Natural Resources (Winter Quarters)
MS&E 341	Advanced Economic Analysis (Spring Quarters)
MS&E 446	Policy and Economics Research Roundtable
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