who are you?

I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at Middlebury College, working mostly on outer space-related issues. I have been on leave at the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy at NASA since Fall 2023.

what is your work about?

Pedagogically, I’m very interested in the use of games and experiential learning to teach mathematical and economic concepts.

My research is mostly about the environmental and industrial economics of outer space, with a second agenda about environmental disasters featuring strong biophysical couplings with economic activity (e.g. infectious disease, fires). There is usually a computational or dynamic flavor in my work. My research is motivated by a desire to see us make better use of limited resources and fragile environments.

academic research

Most of my research is about the economics of orbit use, much of which fits under the increasingly-popular term “space sustainability”. Earth’s orbits are the world’s largest common-pool resource, and as humans launch more satellites the risk of collisions between orbiting objects increases. Paths in low-Earth orbit are under “open access”—firms are unable to secure property rights over orbits. Open access to a common-pool resource typically causes over-exploitation, and sometimes collapse, of the resource. In the orbital case, expect to see more satellite-destroying collisions and a higher risk of Kessler Syndrome in low-Earth orbit than would be socially optimal.

Some of my work on orbit use: measuring the gains from optimal orbital-use management through Pigouvian taxation; developing resource economic theory for open-access vs optimal orbit use and assessing conditions under which Kessler Syndrome is an equilibirum or even optimal outcome; studying economic policy choice and the equilibrium deployment of active debris removal technologies; studying how megaconstellation operators will interact and how they should be regulated; designing integrated assessment models of orbit use; using network theory and econometrics to develop granular models of risk-mitigating maneuvering patterns in orbit; assessing the terrestrial sustainbility impacts of megaconstellations; and analyzing the structure of self-enforcing international agreements to manage collision risk and debris production. These projects involve a mix of economic theory and statistics. Calibrating/estimating the models tends to require substantial new data collection and integration.

Not all of my academic research is about outer space. My other projects tend to be about environmental economics topics, sometimes with a macroeconomic dimension. Projects in this area include: modeling disease-economy trade-offs under different control strategies; estimating the dynamic effects of fires on county-level employment in the US; and studying how risk preferences and altruism respond to natural disasters.

what is your play about?

I like bike rides, snowboarding, and sci-fi/fantasy and historical fiction. I live with cats who think I’m kind of slow.