Dr. Adrienne Ohler is FRI’s Associate Director of Policy Research and an Associate Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Missouri. Her research and teaching focus on environmental, energy, and water economics, with particular emphasis on regulatory economics, energy policy, water quality, and utility systems. Her work examines how public policy, institutional design, and technological change shape energy and water security, environmental quality, infrastructure resilience, and economic outcomes. Her research includes energy markets, advanced metering and residential electricity demand, water quality, distressed water systems, and the non-market valuation of environmental amenities. Using a combination of econometric analysis, survey methods, non-market valuation, and simulation modeling, she evaluates how policy, institutions, and technological change affect natural resources, environmental quality, public infrastructure, and economic outcomes.
Her academic research has been published in Land Economics, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, Contemporary Economic Policy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Finance, The Energy Journal, Energy Policy, and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.
Dr. Ohler earned a Ph.D. in economics and M.S. in statistics from Washington State University, and a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Illinois. Prior to joining the faculty at Missouri in 2019, she was an Associate Professor of Economics at Illinois State University, and Director of Outreach for the Institute for Regulatory Policy Studies.