I am on the 2026-27 academic 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:
In the US, the federal government owns 30% of the country and half of the Western US. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the largest federal land manager, delegates land-use decisions to 175 geographically dispersed field offices. These offices determine where mineral development, which generates billions in public revenue annually, can proceed and where development is restricted for conservation. Federal law dictates that field offices (i) make decisions to maximize federal land’s market and non-market resource values, and (ii) publicly justify their choices to stakeholders. However, field offices maintain significant discretion in how to value nonmarket resources and how to reconcile competing demands from conservation and industry stakeholders. I show that field offices' land-use decisions can be modeled as many discrete choices and use this framework to transform 90,000 pages of planning records across 11 field offices into data suitable for discrete-choice econometric methods. I then estimate 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 $60,000 in annual revenue to conserve one acre. These valuations vary substantially across offices and non-market resources. Suggestive evidence indicates that differences in local preferences explain more of this heterogeneity than differences in environmental damages from development. In seven out of ten decisions, the median office passes up higher net resource benefits to remain closer to an established standard. Counterfactual analyses show that heterogeneous conservation valuations and preferences for established standards jointly shape the relative cost-effectiveness of federal conservation policy instruments and the spatial distribution of the induced conservation.
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.
Weather volatility can make consumer demand harder to predict, potentially increasing food waste at restaurants and grocery stores. Higher temperatures may also accelerate food spoilage, further increasing waste. Large chains can mitigate these effects by investing in inventory management and demand forecasting software, while smaller businesses may lack the resources to do so. Using quarterly establishment-level data on organic and non-organic waste collected in New York City from 2016 to the present, this project examines how weather volatility and temperature affect food waste. We then investigate whether larger chains are better equipped to mitigate these effects, shedding light on how firms' capacity to adapt to environmental conditions shapes both economic losses and environmental outcomes.
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