Hi! I am an applied microeconomist, and a PhD candidate at UC Davis. My research uses the tools of environmental, labor, and development economics to understand how individuals and communuities adapt to environmental risk and technological change.

In my job market paper, I study how environmental shocks shape rural-urban migration decisions, and show how financial constraints can severely restrict rural communities’ ability to use migration as an adaptation strategy. I also have work on the role of electrification in US rural development, price sensitivity in disaster insurance, and non-market valuation of water quality.

I am on the job market in the 2026-2027 academic year. Please click here to view my CV.

Research in Progess

• Climate Migration, Liquidity Constraints, and Trapped Populations (Job Market Paper) with Matt Reimer
  
  Abstract

  Environmental shocks can increase the incentive to migrate but decrease the liquid assets needed to move, trapping some households in place. These opposing effects can mute migration responses, especially in rural economies where liquidity constraints are likely to bind. Yet separating them empirically is difficult because environmental shocks and income are jointly determined. We overcome this challenge using administrative migration data from rural Alaska, fine-scale information on heat shocks and land degradation, and the Permanent Fund Dividend, a universal annual cash transfer whose size varies independently of local environmental conditions. We find that land degradation increases rural-urban migration, while heat shocks decrease migration when the dividend is low but increase it when the dividend is high. Dividend payments offset 83% of the heat-induced decline in migration, relative to no payments. This effect is concentrated in low-wage communities and costly long-distance moves, consistent with a risk-based poverty trap.

  Conferences: AAEA 2026, AERE@WEAI 2026, Giannini Student Conference 2026
  Funding: North Pacific Research Board
  

• Groundwater, Electrification, and Rural Development
  with Katrina Jessoe and Jeff Hadachek (UW-Madison)
  Conferences: AAEA 2026, AERE 2025
  Funding: Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics
  
• The Price of Fear: Salience and Price Sensitivity in Natural Disaster Insurance
  Conferences: Giannini Student Conference 2025
  Funding: UC Davis Institute of the Environment
  
• Permit Migration and the Changing Geography of Fishing-Dependent Communities with Tsugumi Yamashita, Matt Reimer, and Jim Sanchirico

^{Thawing permafrost in Herschel Island, by Boris Radosavljevic (2013)}
In my job market paper, I examine how environmental degradation in resource-dependent communities affects rural-urban migration choices, and then use variation in the world’s longest-running universal cash transfer (The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend) to show how liquidity constraints suppress this adaptive migration.