Maghfira (Afi) Ramadhani

About

Welcome to my personal website! You can call me Afi. I am a PhD student at Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Economics.

My research interests are energy and environmental economics, applied microeconomics, and empirical industrial organization. Much of my existing work focuses on how households and firms respond to the broad impact of climate change and the energy transition.

I am originally from Indonesia, a wonderful country in Southeast Asia. Before starting my PhD, I worked as an academic professional at Institute of Technology Bandung and as an expert consultant for various energy and environmental policy think tanks.

CV (Updated October 2024)

My Google Scholar
My GitHub

Contact

Email: maghfira.ramadhani@gatech.edu
Office Hours: Sign up here: Book a time with me

Publications

National oil companies and fossil fuel subsidy regimes in transition: The case of Indonesia

(with Muchammad Ichsan and Matthew Lockwood)

The Extractive Industries and Society, September 2022

Abstract (click to expand): It has long been recognised that national oil companies (NOCs) offer the means for funding and delivering fuel subsidies as a politically valuable good. But what happens when the oil begins to run out? Fiscal pressures will clearly increase, but there is also evidence that net importers with NOCs are still more likely to have subsidies than those without. A key question about countries moving through this transition is therefore whether and how the role of NOCs in the subsidy regime changes as the classic logic erodes. We examine these issues in a detailed case study of Indonesia, which became a net oil importer in the early 2000s. A series of partial reforms of FFS has followed, but subsidies remain and the NOC still plays a central role in their delivery. We find that certain functions of the NOC, such as obfuscating the fiscal cost of subsidies, have eroded. But increasing fiscal pressure has not so far overcome the political lock-in of subsidies and institutional inertia in the role of the NOC. Fundamental reform remains unlikely in the short term, but separating the upstream and downstream businesses of the NOC and changing its governance could help support that reform.

Work in Progress

Digital Dispatch and Demand Response in Grid Emergencies: Evidence from Household Cooling in California's Flex Alerts

(with Dylan Brewer)

Draft available upon request. Scheduled for presentation at SWEEEP@Georgia Tech, AERE@MEA 2025. Presented at CU Environmental and Resource Economics Workshop 2024​

Managing Transition to Intermittent Renewable Electric Power

(with Daniel Matisoff, Matthew Oliver, Santiago Grijalva, Oliver Chapman and Amanda West)

Academic Presentations

2024: Southeastern Workshop on Energy & Environmental Economics & Policy (Atlanta, GA) [Scheduled], CU Environmental and Resource Economics Workshop (Vail, CO), Georgia Tech Energy Policy and Innovation Center (EPICenter) (Atlanta, GA)

2022: South East Asia Energy Transition Partnership - Roundtables Executive Training, Australian National University (Virtual)

Miscellaneous

Website: This website is adapted from Gautam Rao’s website, which is publicly available on his Github.