Jimena Rico-Straffon

Jimena Rico-Straffon is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics whose research explores how environmental stressors shape labor markets and time use in urban settings. Her job market paper examines the short-run effects of water shortages on hours worked in Mexico City, showing that water insecurity affects labor supply through gendered shifts in home production and caregiving.

She builds novel panel datasets that combine household surveys, water billing records, infrastructure maps, and reservoir storage data to study the socio-economic impacts of climate and water stress. Her broader research evaluates the effects of forest policies that allocate land-use rights to private actors on tropical deforestation, using historical remote sensing data and causal inference methods.

Before joining UCSB, Jimena worked at Mexico’s central bank, the World Wildlife Fund, and Mexico’s Institute of Ecology and Climate Change.