I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech.

I hold a PhD in Food and Resource Economics (& graduate certificate in Tropical Conservation and Development) from the University of Florida and a Master of Environmental Policy from Duke University. Before Virginia Tech, I was a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University. 

I work in development and environmental economics, focusing on rural finance, climate risk, and farmer and household responses to environmental shocks. My past and ongoing research spans India, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, and China. 

Job Market Paper

When index insurance crowds out self-insurance: Bundled drought-tolerant rice and weather index insurance in India (With Patrick S. Ward and David J. Spielman); Under review

Stress-tolerant crop varieties and insurance are common tools for managing agricultural risk, but stress-tolerant varieties provide limited protection against severe shocks, whereas insurance is often costly and faces low demand. Using a cluster randomized controlled trial among smallholder rice farmers in Odisha, India, we evaluate the effects of drought-tolerant rice (DT) varieties and a bundled intervention combining DT with weather-index insurance (WII), which is designed to complement DT and provide a low-cost risk management solution. We find that while providing DT seeds alone resulted in higher yields under moderate drought, providing the DT-WII bundle reduced rice yields, reflecting lower expenditures on agricultural inputs. This appears among insured farmers regardless of whether they believed their conditions warranted a payout, consistent with substitution between market insurance and self-insurance. More concerningly, farmers who perceived drought conditions that the WII index failed to capture, either due to basis risk or exaggerated perceptions of drought, were left worse off.