Louis Preonas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, at the University of Maryland, College Park.

He is an energy and environmental economist, and much of his research focuses on interacting market distortions in U.S. energy markets. His recent work studies market power in U.S. coal transportation, and analyzes the extent to which decreasing coal markups may lead to incomplete pass-through of a carbon tax.

Preonas also works at the intersection of environmental and development economics, focusing on the economic impacts of electricity access in the developing world. Other ongoing projects include: evaluating the private and social costs of inefficient electricity supply in India; estimating demand elasticities for electricity and groundwater in California agriculture, in order to characterize spatial pumping cost externalities, surface water substitution, and planting decisions; and improving the design of randomized experiments using panel data.