Ellen Bruno wins AAEA Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award
Aug. 1, 2019
Ellen Bruno won the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association’s Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2019 for her work, “An Evaluation of Policy Instruments for Sustainable Groundwater Management.” Dr. Bruno’s dissertation examines the economic impacts of three policy instruments to manage groundwater resources: cap and trade, excise taxes, and command and control. A unique feature of her work is that it explicitly accounts for market power, including the likely presence of market influence in groundwater trading and among large grower-shippers, the formation of coalitions among buyers and sellers, and competition among a few water agencies on a shared basin. The study finds that the overall efficiency impact of market power (by either buyers or sellers) is small, with a deadweight loss of at most 11% of economic surplus under perfect competition. The distributional impacts, however, can be large. ARE Professors Katrina Jessoe and Richard Sexton chaired Dr. Bruno’s dissertation committee.
Click here to find more information about Dr. Bruno’s thesis.
Dr. Bruno is currently Cooperative Extension Specialist in quantitative policy analysis at the University of California, Berkeley. Click here to learn more about what she is doing.
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