Advisory Council & Author

Ted Gayer

Senior Fellow & Co-Director of Economic Studies, The Brookings Institution

Ted Gayer is the Co-Director of the Economic Studies program and the Joseph A. Pechman Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He conducts research on a variety of economic issues, focusing particularly on public finance, environmental and energy economics, housing, and regulatory policy.

Prior to joining the Brookings Institution in September 2009, he was Associate Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University. From 2007 to 2008, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Department of the Treasury. While at Treasury, he worked primarily on housing and credit market policies, as well as on energy and environmental issues, health care, Social Security, and Medicare.

From 2003 to 2004, Gayer was a Senior Economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he worked on environmental and energy policies. From 2006 to 2007, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, and from 2004 to 2006 he was a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Gayer has written on such things as cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and the design of market-based environmental policies. He has also researched education policy and the history of economics. His work has been published in numerous journals, including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Science, the Journal of Economic Literature, and the Journal of Human Resources. He has also co-edited (with W. Kip Viscusi) the two-volume Classics in Risk Management and has co-authored (with Harvey Rosen) the textbook Public Finance, 8th edition.