Bansari Saha

Senior Director, Economics

Massachusetts

Bansari helps clients find optimal solutions at the intersection of energy and environmental challenges.

Bansari supports public and private sector clients in understanding the economic effects of public policy decision-making. His expertise lies at the intersection of energy and environmental issues, and he seeks solutions that optimize the balance between the two. Bansari analyzes the economic impacts of reducing emissions across various sectors in cost-effective and environmentally conscious ways, including supply and demand within the energy value chain.

Bansari’s work covers electricity generation and upstream fuel sectors on the supply side and transportation and energy efficiency from the demand perspective. He analyzes the economic implications of clean energy-based economic development and studies various regulatory approaches. That includes market-based programs to efficiently and cost-effectively deploy clean energy resources.

A nationally renowned expert on the REMI Policy Insight model, Bansari evaluates the economic and distributional impacts of policies on federal, state, and local clients in the public sector, non-governmental organizations, foundations, and private-sector clients. He also researches the macroeconomic (and other general equilibrium effects) of economy-wide decarbonization policies for state and national levels.

Bansari works extensively on international economic development issues, particularly for developing countries in South and Southeast Asia. His expertise in market-based energy policies helps clients in the U.S., the EU, and developing countries in Asia, understand the efficiencies of those policies versus traditional command-and-control approaches. This applies in terms of societal costs and benefits as well as distributional and competitiveness impacts.

In his role, Bansari measures the economic implications of damage to our critical infrastructure, including the transmission grid and other vulnerable infrastructure. He also manages economic impact models to estimate the regional economic effects of offshore and onshore oil and gas exploration and drilling activities. He analyzes ramifications for labor markets and other regional economic consequences for various infrastructure projects, including building new power plants and the wage and labor supply elasticities for different occupational groups.

Bansari works with the Environmental Protection Agency to estimate the benefits of brownfield cleanups and redevelopment using a hedonic housing model. He also evaluates models for the earnings relationship for truck drivers for a proposed regulation on hours-of-service.

"While our Economic Impacts of U.S. Decarbonization Efforts study paints an overall rosy picture, it also shows that there would be losses in the fossil fuel sector compared to business-as-usual. But on the whole, we're better off. There's always a concern that we can't shift to clean energy without hurting the economy. But it looks like you can under the scenarios modeled here--and you can do it with an overall benefit to the economy."

Areas of expertise