I am a PhD student and Job Market Candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. My primary research field is environmental economics, with a broad interest in applied microeconomics and the fields of labor economics, public economics, and behavioral economics.
My job market paper examines the learning process that economic agents use to update their belief of an uncertain and infrequently observed event. I use data on the purchase of flood insurance in the US to test whether homeowners incorporate all available flooding information when updating their expectation of a future flood. I conclude that a homeowner learning model that allows for forgetting is most consistent with observed insurance take-up.
In previous (co-authored) research, I use the housing market to develop estimates of the local welfare impacts of Superfund sponsored clean-ups of hazardous waste sites. Work in progress includes estimating the causal effect that the introduction of flood insurance had on new development in the US and estimating whether communities with more rapid development are associated with more severe flooding due to changes in the geography of the community.