Andy Hultgren is an environmental and IO economist with research interests in firm behavior under regulatory uncertainty and in quantifying the economic impacts of climate change. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago (Department of Economics and EPIC) and a member of the Climate Impact Lab. His doctoral studies were at UC Berkeley in Agricultural and Resource Economics, where he was a fellow in the Global Policy Lab and an NSF Data Sciences for the 21st Century fellow. He also hold a Master’s in public policy from UC Berkeley, and a BSE in chemical engineering from Princeton University.
Before his doctoral studies, Hultgren provided climate change analysis services for several federal agency regulatory proceedings and advised numerous local governments and private businesses on approaches to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Along with his wife and two kids, he also spent two years in the Argentine Patagonia studying sustainable construction techniques.
Research: My job market paper estimates how firms respond strategically under uncertainty to the threat of future regulation. Firms facing potential future regulation of one of their products must trade off investments in innovation of substitutes against investments in lobbying over regulation. Firm strategic responses are driven by their market power, degree of perceived competitive advantage, and pre-existing capacities for innovation and lobbying. To estimate the model, I scrape approximately 10,000 publications to construct a novel dataset of initial discoveries of previously unknown product harms, which I leverage as a source of exogenous variation to firm information sets.
I also have several projects seeking to estimate the impacts of climate change on human society, including impacts to agricultural productivity (lead author), human mortality, labor supply, and energy consumption; and how to integrate these impacts into a combined estimate of the social cost of carbon (all with the Climate Impact Lab). A separate project seeks to estimate how agricultural land use responds to climatic changes, asking whether and to what extent cropped areas will “migrate” as the climate changes.
Fields of Interests: Environmental and resource economics, industrial organization