I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research interests lie broadly in environmental, public, and behavioral economics. I am specifically interested in the short- and long-run impacts of natural disasters and how these are mediated by social policy and disaster aid. I also study the health effects and distributional impacts of air pollution and how these have changed over time. Finally, I continue to investigate how people form and update their beliefs about the occurrence and likely consequences of climate change.

On my research page, you can see which projects have been successfully completed or are on deck. You can also click here to download a PDF of my full CV (updated June 2019). My longer-term goals include describing which insurance markets around the world seem to function “well” (if any!) and making progress on understanding what drives individuals' insurance decisions.

In my spare time, I am working on Academic Sequitur, a subscription service/website that helps academics stay up to date on research. I also like to Tweet and blog to share my thoughts on various topics with the world and add a (hopefully) reasonable voice to our public discourse. I have a blog post with suggestions for how graduate students should go about developing research ideas, a series of blog posts about how to judge the validity of a scientific study (1, 2, 3, 4, and counting…), and what people mean when they write "This is a fruitful area for future research". Oh, and once I wrote a post about genetic engineering.

I received my PhD in Economics from MIT in February 2012. I am also a proud alumna of UC Berkeley. In 2006, I received a BA in Applied Mathematics and a BS in Environmental Economics and Policy from Cal.