Econ Grad School

So you're thinking about life after Davidson and possibly interested in going to graduate school in Economics ...

"I'm actually at UC-Santa Cruz in the Environmental Studies Department working on my PhD. I'm mostly doing economics though with the sciences I'll need for my dissertation. I'll be focusing on river issues. Tentatively, I'm looking into combining economic modeling with fish population modeling and hydrology to evaluate options for dam relicensing/recomissioning. I've been talking to be people with the forest service and some water agencies about the decisions they have to make to determine the most efficient use of water, between recreation, ecosystem protection, energy, and irrigation, when establishing new guidelines for dam management. I might try to incorporate changes to flow regimes from climate change as well."

"I'm still at University of California, Santa Cruz, working on my dissertation applying environmental economics and game theory to problems encountered during river restoration efforts. Specifically, I'm using survey and biological data to fuel interactive decision models to better predict how farmers and other resource users will react to various restoration proposals. With these models then I explore methods to optimize river restoration involving conflict and hostile stakeholders who have recourse to counter restoration efforts. I'm also working on a few other efforts to use real data to fuel dynamic game-theoretic models and link ecological models with game models to capture feedbacks between social and natural systems. Eventhough I'm not in a strict economics department, my committee is primarily all economists and I have funding for my dissertation under a National Science Foundation Dissertation Grant in Economics, in addition to other sources. I also do quite a bit of economic consulting for Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund out here to counter some shoddy economics that Duke Energy cooks up to justify exemptions to the Clean Water Act for their coastal power plants."