Climate Economist | Agricultural Trade | Applied Econometrics

I am a Fulbright PhD candidate in Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University, expected to graduate in August 2026. My research uses applied econometrics and large climate, disaster, and trade datasets to study how extreme weather and climate disasters affect agricultural production, international trade, and food security across regional and global markets.

Research

My dissertation, supervised by Dr. Nelson Villoria, consists of three essays on climate shocks and agricultural trade.

The first, my job market paper, currently under revision at the Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association,  links PRISM weather data and CMIP6 climate projections with USDA records to estimate how heat and rainfall extremes affect corn and soybean yields and exports in the US Midwest. The second analyzes how climate disasters reshape rice trade across Southeast Asia using EM-DAT disaster records and USITC bilateral trade data in a gravity framework. The third extends the analysis globally across corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, and cotton.

Methods & data

I work with panel data using two-way fixed effects and gravity models, building reproducible pipelines in R, Python, and Stata to harmonize PRISM, CMIP6, EM-DAT, CRU, USDA, FAO, USITC, and UNCTAD sources.

Background

Before my PhD, I taught economics for five years at Northwest Minzu University in China and conducted climate and rural-vulnerability research in Pakistan with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute. My peer-reviewed work in PLOS One examines how institutional quality and absorptive capacity shape the link between foreign direct investment and domestic innovation. In 2025, I was part of the Kansas State team that placed third in the AAEA Graduate Case Study Competition.

Research interests

Climate economics · Climate risk and extreme events · International agricultural trade · Food security and food-system resilience · Applied panel econometrics · Adaptation policy

I am on the 2026 academic job market and also open to policy-research and postdoctoral opportunities.

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