I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Florida State University, on the academic job market for 2026–27. I work in economic history and law and economics, with applied research on land use, environmental, resource, and energy policy.
Alongside my doctoral work, I serve as a Senior Economist with the Florida Legislature's Office of Economic and Demographic Research. I am also completing an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Florida State, with a thesis on the economic value of forecast information in hydropower operations.
Research
Job Market PaperEconomic History · Law & Economics
The Impact of the Taylor Grazing Act: Heterogeneous Investment Responses and Land Use Change
How bundling grazing rights with private base property redirected investment across the western range, with effects that persist four decades on.
The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 converted the open range of the American West into grazing rights bundled with private "base" property. I model how this structure directs complementary investment toward the deeded base and test its predictions with a continuous-treatment difference-in-differences design covering 302 western counties from 1910 to 1974. Secure rights capitalized durably into farmland values even as grazing pressure fell. Values rose most where stocking declined most, in line with ending open-access dissipation, and investment reallocated as the model predicts, tilting from land toward capital as exposure rose. The effects persist four decades after the Act, evidence that how rights are structured, not merely whether they exist, shapes production for generations.
Working PaperEnvironment · Information
Graded Warnings and the Structure of Avoidance: Evidence from Florida Red Tide
How response to a graded warning system is structured across its tiers, and what that implies for where the boundaries should fall.
NOAA assigns Florida Gulf Coast counties a five-tier red tide warning during active blooms, with tier boundaries drawn on the presumption that higher tiers call forth larger protective response. I test this using a multi-valued difference-in-differences design on two coastal-activity margins that differ in adjustment cost, hotel occupancy and state park visitation, with satellite chlorophyll-a, weather station records, and state monitoring data isolating exogenous variation in the posted warning. Neither margin scales smoothly with severity. Each switches on at a threshold set by its relative adjustment cost. Setting tier boundaries well may therefore depend on the adjustment costs of the behaviors a warning targets, not on the gradation of the hazard alone.
In ProgressEnvironment · Regulation
Wetland Mitigation Banking: Economic Impacts and Policy Effectiveness
Whether wetland mitigation banks lower the cost of regulatory compliance or chiefly compress its timeline.
Draft in preparation
In Progresswith Benjamin Emmich · Land & Property
Conservation Land Values: Spillover Effects on Adjacent Private Property
Whether null results in hedonic studies of conservation land mask spillovers that cancel across land-use types.
Draft in preparation
M.S. ThesisMechanical Engineering · Energy
Operational Economics of Forecast Uncertainty in Short-Term Hydropower Scheduling under Operator Risk Preferences
What is the economic value of resolving forecast uncertainty for a price-taking hydropower operator at short-term horizons, and how does that value vary with risk tolerance?
Defense planned Dec 2026
Teaching
Principles of Macroeconomics Florida A&M University
Spring 2023
Principles of Macroeconomics Florida State University95 students · 4/5
Spring 2022
Principles of Macroeconomics Florida A&M University
Spring 2022
Principles of Macroeconomics Florida State University102 students · 4/5
Fall 2021
Economics of State & Local Government Florida State University18 students · 5/5
Summer 2020
Economics of Crime Florida State University21 students · 4/5
Summer 2019
Principles of Microeconomics Florida State University45 students · 4/5
Summer 2018
CV & Contact
Education
Ph.D. Economics, FSU — exp. 2027
M.S. Mechanical Engineering, FSU — exp. 2026
M.S. Economics, FSU — 2018
B.B.A. Economics & Finance, MSU — 2016
B.A. Mathematics, MSU — 2016
Fields
Economic History
Law and Economics
Environmental · Institutional · Energy
Honors
Hilton Jr. Center Fellowship
Undergraduate Research Award, MSU
Technical
StataRPythonMATLABEViewsQGIS / ArcGISSQLLaTeX
References from Carl Kitchens (chair), Shawn Kantor, and Luke Rodgers available on request.
