Clarification appended.

The Obama administration has tapped a Yale economist to lead the Treasury Department's international energy work, including the development of the Green Climate Fund.

Matthew Kotchen, associate professor of environmental economics and policy at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, will serve as the agency's deputy assistant secretary for environment and energy. He replaces Gilbert Metcalf, who returned last month to his post as a professor at Tufts University.

As a researcher, Kotchen has written on everything from bias in college football rankings to daylight saving time. He once argued in a New York Times op-ed for eliminating the tradition of changing clocks ahead and back with the seasons and showed in a study of Indiana's 92 counties that granting an extra hour of summer sunlight actually wastes energy.

More recently, he published a review of U.S. EPA's proposed carbon pollution standards for new power plants and found that no coal plants and only a few natural gas plants currently online would comply with the standards without new innovation in carbon capture and storage technology to meet the average emission rate over 30 years. The study found that 81 to 90 percent of plants planned for construction and subject to EPA's rule would comply.

In a separate study, he found that Americans would be willing to pay about 13 percent more on their annual electric bills to create a clean energy standard of 80 percent by 2035.

At Treasury, Kotchen will be responsible for the administration's commitment as part of the Group of 20 economies to phase out fossil fuel subsidies globally; managing U.S. foreign aid through the World Bank and other multilateral agencies for energy and environment work; and continuing to negotiate the creation of the Green Climate Fund, which will manage some portion of $100 billion in annual funding that nations vowed to mobilize by 2020.

How best to mobilize that money will be a front-and-center issue for the Obama administration this year, with the State Department planning a high-level meeting before spring.

Kotchen also serves as a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He joined Yale in 2009 and has held previous and visiting positions at Williams College; the University of California at both Santa Barbara and Berkeley; Stanford University; and Resources for the Future. He serves on EPA's Science Advisory Board.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story did not make clear that Matthew Kotchen's review of proposed carbon pollution standards made a distinction between online power plants and planned plants.