I am on the 2026-27 job market.
About:
- I am a sixth year PhD student in Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
- I am an environmental economist studying how public institutions make environmental policy and how markets respond.
- During my PhD, I was a graduate fellow at the NYC Department of Sanitation working for Jennifer McDonnell.
- Before my PhD, I worked as a research assistant at the Climate Impact Lab.
- I hold a BA from Bowdoin College in Economics.
- Find my full CV here.
Job market paper:
The US federal government owns nearly half of the Western United States, one of the least developed contiguous landscapes in the world. Public agencies, rather than markets, allocate these lands between development and conservation. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is the primary agency making this tradeoff, deciding where mineral extraction that generates billions in public revenue should proceed and where it should be forgone for conservation. Despite the importance of the BLM’s allocation decisions, the mechanisms underlying them have never been studied. Federal law requires the BLM to maximize the land’s market and non-market resource values and publicly justify its choices to stakeholders. But the law does not specify how to value non-market resources or reconcile competing demands from pro-conservation and pro-industry stakeholders. As a result, roughly 150 local offices retain wide discretion over these judgments. Until now, systematically studying how offices exercise that discretion has been infeasible because the evidence is scattered across sprawling planning records and maps. I develop a framework using AI agents to transform these records into a form suitable for discrete-choice econometric methods. I then apply this framework to 11 local offices and roughly 90,000 pages of planning records, recovering how much revenue each office would forgo to (i) conserve non-market resources and (ii) follow established conservation standards rather than justify departing from them to stakeholders. I find that the median office is willing to forgo roughly $60,000 in annual revenue to conserve one acre. I also find that in seven out of ten decisions, the median office passes up the resource-value-maximizing choice to remain closer to an established standard. This tendency to follow standard practice matters for policy. I compare two ways BLM headquarters can steer local offices. One is to recommend a specific conservation practice, such as a one-mile no-drilling buffer around birds’ nests. The other is to use a price-like instrument that specifies the value of conserving a resource. Counterfactuals show that the recommended practice can be as cost-effective as the price-like instrument in achieving the same conservation gains.
Working papers:
Recycling — collecting discarded items and redeeming their scrap value — channels income to marginalized populations. This paper evaluates the importance and prevalence of these earnings throughout the US. Specifically, this paper shows that positive shocks in recycling earnings increase household food expenditures and improve birth outcomes. Bottle bills — a policy requiring refundable deposits on beverage containers — boost food expenditures by approximately 10.2%, increasing recycling earnings by roughly $1400/year (in 2015 dollars) — an amount achievable by collecting 38 containers per day during the sample period. The effect is concentrated among low-income, able bodied households — a population likely to recycle for cash. Moreover, recycling earnings increases improve birth outcomes — a proxy for economic well-being in low-income populations. Back-of-the-envelope calculations imply that informal recycling markets are 50% as effective as food stamps at reducing the incidence of low birth weight. The striking comparability between recycling earnings and a targeted welfare program can be explained by both the size of recycling generated income and the distinct populations each income source reaches.
The Green Paradox posits that fossil fuel markets respond to changing expectations about climate legislation, which limits future consumption, by shifting consumption to the present through lower present-day prices. We demonstrate that oil futures responded negatively to daily changes in the prediction market's expectations that the Waxman-Markey bill — the US climate bill discussed in 2009-2010 — would pass. This effect is consistent across various maturities as the proposed legislation would reset the entire price and consumption path, unlike temporary supply or demand shocks that phase out over time. The bill’s passage would have increased current global oil consumption by 2-4%. Furthermore, a strengthening of climate policy, as measured by monthly variations in media salience regarding climate policy over the last four decades, and two court rulings signaling limited future fossil fuel use, were associated with negative abnormal oil future returns. Taken together, our findings confirm that restricting future fossil fuel use will accelerate current-day consumption.
Selected work in progress:
How do conservation standards emerge and spread across environmental impact statements prepared by public land agencies? When conducting environmental review, local agency offices must weigh the benefits and costs of alternative land uses and publicly justify their decisions. Offices frequently defend their choices by citing established conservation standards rather than relying solely on the benefits and costs specific to each decision, which can be more burdensome to justify to stakeholders. We use large language models to construct a novel dataset tracing the origins and diffusion of these standards. We investigate whether they spread through networks of influence among local offices or through the adoption of centrally issued guidance.
Recommended environmental studies reads:
- Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon
- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Song for the Blue Ocean by Carl Safina
- Erosion: Essays of Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams
- Making Bureaucracies Think: The Environmental Impact Statement Strategy of Administrative Reform by Serge Taylor