About me

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics at Colorado State University, currently on the job market. My research focuses on environmental and natural resource economics, agricultural economics, groundwater management, and producer decision-making. My current work examines the economics of farmers' participation in groundwater conservation and land retirement programs.

My job-market paper examines how producers choose between two federal conservation programs, CREP and EQIP, to retire irrigated cropland in Colorado's Republican River Basin, and identifies the conditions under which a single program versus a mix of programs achieves a given acreage-retirement target at the lowest cost. I used a theoretical model to describe how farmers self-select into different programs.

The second chapter develops an optimization model integrated with a multiregional input–output model to simulate the regional economic impacts of removing land from irrigated production using different strategies. This analysis combines regional economic data with field-level participation information using Stata, R, and QGIS. Components of the first two chapters were used in a report sanctioned by the State of Colorado that evaluates the potential economic consequences of large-scale groundwater curtailment in the eastern portion of the state.

My third chapter ddresses a macroeconomic question related to economic development and the environment, examining how foreign direct investment influences carbon emissions through international trade and technology transfer, using a panel of 164 countries from 2000 to 2025.