Researcher Summary
I conduct research in applied microeconomic areas, often with a policy emphasis. Examples include the effectiveness of school funding for disadvantaged students, the incentives for pharmaceutical companies regarding the release of drugs with unknown long term effects, the effects of rising house prices on fertility, and the effects of rising social diversity on people's volunteering, donations to local schools, and tax compliance.
With equal emphasis, I use lab experiments to test ideas relevant for environmental economics or development. Examples include testing whether revenue sharing makes group liability microfinance work better for higher risk business start ups in developing countries, whether stakeholders in land and resource-use conflicts can successfully bargain to efficient solutions in place of government policy-setting, and whether environmental valuation techniques such as contingent valuation are reliable. I am currently looking at how the efficiency achieved by pollution control policies typically favoured by economists can be undermined by their perceived inequity when the policies are weakly enforced.
