Karl M. Aspelund

Karl M. Aspelund will join the Yale School of the Environment in July 2026. His research focuses on the design of environmental and natural resource regulation, with a particular emphasis on market-based policy instruments. He combines theoretical insights from mechanism design and public economics with administrative and remote-sensing data to study how real-world features of regulation—such as equity objectives, climate-induced uncertainty, and asymmetric information—shape the design and performance of policies promoting environmental restoration and sustainability. He studies a range of environmental setting using tools from empirical industrial organization, including forests, fisheries, and ecosystem services on agricultural land. His current projects include evaluating a large-scale tree-planting program and studying the design of forest carbon offsets.