Hi, I'm Edward Whitney and I study the economics of development and natural resource managment.

I am a recent PhD graduate from the Agricultural and Resource Economics program at UC Davis. My research focuses on public health and natural resource management in developing countries. In my job market paper (under submission) titled "Ancillary Consequences of Targeted Policy Interventions in the Presence of Disease-Based Poverty Traps: Evidence from Uganda", my co-authors and I develop a coupled natural-human system model of a local economy integrated with ecological and disease dynamics, which we use to investigate the direct and ancillary consequences of targeted policy interventions in a rural, developing-country setting where household livelihoods are deeply linked to health and the environment. Our results demonstrate that targeted policy interventions can produce both intuitive and counterintuitive consequences. Productivity-enhancing interventions can produce economic, ecological, and public health benefits, while interventions that target ecological objectives may inadvertently prop up conditions that underlie disease-based poverty traps. I'm excited to connect with other researchers on these subjects, so if your research overlaps feel free to contact me.

Before returning to school, I worked for three years at the International Food Policy Research Institute as a research analyst, focusing mostly on poverty analysis in Pakistan. I have a master's degree in International Development from American University and a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Utah.