Catherine Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. Her work has analyzed rural electrification programs in the developing world, energy efficiency programs in the US, the effects of environmental regulation on energy markets and the impact of privatization and restructuring in the US and UK.

She is the Cora Jane Flood professor of business administration and associate dean for academic affairs at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, as well as an affiliated faculty member of in the Agriculture and Resource Economics department and the Energy and Resources Group at Berkeley. ​ Wolfram is also the program director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Environment and Energy Economics Program, faculty director of The E2e Project, a research organization focused on energy efficiency and a research affiliate at the Energy Institute at Haas. 

She is currently implementing several randomized controlled trials to evaluate energy programs in the U.S., Ghana, and Kenya. She received a PhD in Economics from MIT in 1996 and an AB from Harvard in 1989. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard.