Bio

Sofia Berto Villas-Boas is the Class of 1934 Robert Gordon Sproul Distinguished Professor in Agricultural Economics and Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics. She serves as the Department Chair of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Portugal in 1971, she received her Ph.D. in Economics from U.C. Berkeley in May 2002. Her research interests include industrial organization, consumer behavior, food policy, and environmental regulation. Her recent empirical work estimates the effects of various policies on consumer behavior, including product labeling changes, a bottled water tax, a plastic bag ban, and a soda tax campaign, as well as their implementation. Other published work has focused on the economics of wholesale price discrimination bans, contractual relationships along a vertical supply chain, and the role of those contracts in explaining how cost shocks pass through the supply chain into the retail prices consumers face. She has published in top economics and field journals such as The Review of Economic Studies, RAND Journal of Economics, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Marketing Science, Management Science, and Review of Economics and Statistics. She teaches Quantitative Policy Analysis using Structural Modeling and Applied Econometrics in the Agricultural and Resource Policy field in the ARE Ph.D. program and Econometrics in the undergraduate  Environmental Economics and Policy major at the Rausser College of Natural Resources. In her abundant spare time, she organizes conferences (for a reference, ask Professor Alain de Janvry). She has received three Masters from Berkeley (Master Vasco, Master Diogo, and Master Ze Maria) and one Master from Portugal (Master Joao).