I am an environmental and labor economist at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). I am affiliated with CEEP, the Climate School, and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). From 2023 to 2024, I was a Senior Advisor in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). I study how forecasts and other types of information affect actions in settings including adaptation to climate change, risk-taking in research, and time use. These days, I am especially fascinated by how people perceive and use weather forecasts—a decades-long information intervention going on every hour of the day, all around the world.

News and updates

2023-07-12

Derek, Laura, and I have written an op-ed on the role of weather forecasts in saving people’s lives from extreme temperatures. Check it out here at the LA Times.

2023-06-22

As a super busy June comes to a close, I have another new paper draft available! “Choose Your Moments: Peer Review and Scientific Risk Taking”, coauthored with Richard Carson and Josh Graff Zivin, shows that biomedical scientists in the U.S. would prefer to take more risks than the NIH when funding scientific proposals. We derive the funding rule scientists want the NIH to follow, showing that it would cause a reevaluation of funding for $3 billion worth of medical research each year.

2023-06-18

A new version of the paper “Why Do We Procrastinate? Present Bias and Optimism” is available here. It includes the results of a new, large-scale experiment studying how overconfidence can cause procrastination.

2023-06-06

A new version of my paper on the implications of climate forecasts for estimates of climate damage is available here.

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