Experience with Washington’s cap-and-invest program transformed initial opposition to carbon pricing into broader support for the policy. Voter data and survey evidence show that firsthand experience, rather than ideology, drove this shift—boosting approval specifically for the policy voters lived under.
This paper models the dynamic optimization problem faced by dam managers balancing upstream recreation and downstream flows in a non-autonomous, seasonal environment. Using Jackson Lake as a case study, it compares actual versus optimal management, quantifies the impact of hydrological shocks, and offers a decision-support framework for adapting to future climate and political pressures.
The paper investigates how making disaster outcomes more tangible—by revealing whether losses were preventable—affects collective investment in risk mitigation. Using a theoretical model and a 2×2 lab experiment, it shows that when people can attribute outcomes to their own actions, they invest more in prevention after both success and failure, highlighting that causal feedback and observability are key to sustaining preventive behavior.
Published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, 2025
People are more tolerant of grizzly encounters than management rules, all, with significant local and regional variation. We use survey data and predictive mapping to document these misalignments between public preferences and federal risk standards.
Recommended citation: Hubbard, C. Fletcher, I.M., Cherry, T.L. et al. The public overestimates and prefers greater tolerance for grizzly bear encounters than defined by the United States management guidelines. Commun Earth Environ 6, 1022 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02969-9
Link to Paper | Link to Replication Package | Download Bibtex
The paper develops an economic model explaining how countries shift early childhood development investments from health to education as they grow richer and survival improves. Using global data, it finds that nations first focus on survival-related spending, then sharply increase education investment with rising income and health quality—highlighting the importance of sequencing and tailoring ECD policies to development stage rather than adopting uniform strategies.
Prevention policies systematically fail because their greatest successes are invisible: avoided disasters, prevented diseases, and non-events that cannot be attributed to the policies that caused them. This paper argues that this “intangibility” problem is distinct from other behavioral biases and requires institutional reforms that reward policymakers for outcomes no one can see.
The paper investigates how making disaster outcomes more tangible—by revealing whether losses were preventable—affects individual investment in risk mitigation. Using a theoretical model and a 2×2 lab experiment, it shows that when people can attribute outcomes to their own actions, they invest more in prevention after both success and failure, highlighting that causal feedback and observability are key to sustaining preventive behavior.
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Updating the larger WyACT grant team on the progress of the paper. The current version of the paper can be found here.
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Presented this work at a joint research seminar day where graduate students from Colorado State University’s Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics and the University of Wyoming’s Department of Economics present to members of each department. The current version of the paper can be found here.
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Presented this work to attendees at the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists summer meeting in Albuquerque, NM. The current version of the paper can be found here.
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Presented this work as my master’s thesis at a symposium where all third-year economics PhD students present their theses. The paper is currently paused as we investigate the identification strategy further.
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Presented this work to attendees at the Southern Economic Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The current version of the paper can be found here.
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Updating the larger WyACT grant team on the progress of the paper. The current version of the paper can be found here.
Undergraduate course, University of Wyoming, Department of Accounting & Finance, 2025
Studies the management of capital in a business. Students learn how to use the time value of money to value cash flows and how to perform a financial valuation of a firm’s assets and liabilities.
Undergraduate course, University of Wyoming, Department of Economics, 2025
Relative to a beginning course, this is a more advanced course on the theory of demand, production, cost, and supply; and the theory of the firm, including market price under monopoly, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly. Attention is given to the theory of factor prices and topics on welfare economics.