Jimena Rico-Straffon is a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests lie at the intersection of environmental, development, and labor economics. Her current research estimates the effects of water shortages on urban households using administrative and survey data from Mexico City. Her research also studies the effects of forest policies on deforestation and degradation in tropical forests. Jimena holds a Master of Public Policy from Duke University and a B.A. in Economics from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). education.

Grants, Awards and Distinctions:

Deacon Fellowship, UCSB Economics Department

UC MEXUS- CONACYT Doctoral Fellowship (2019-2024)

UC Berkeley and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Diversity Fellowship for participating in the Berkeley/Sloan Summer School in Energy and Environmental Economics, $1,000

CAF Development Bank of Latin America, Research Grant on Sustainable Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, co-PI, $6,000

Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, UCSB Economics (2023) 

Ruth Morales is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Economics at UC Santa Barbara. Before starting at UCSB, she earned both a B.A. and M.A. in economics from San Diego State University. Her primary research interests are in labor economics and public economics. She is especially interested in investigating outcomes related to education, crime, and immigration policies. Her current lines of research focus on the demographic effects of the Bracero Program and on the impact of college-level remedial education reform in the community college system.

I am a graduate student in the Integrative Anthropological Sciences program, and I graduated with my bachelor’s degrees in biological anthropology and environmental studies at UCSB. My primary interests include human behavior ecology, especially in parental investment and demographic transition, and variability selection hypothesis. My current research focuses on examining over-investment behavior, especially in developing countries, through major concepts of HBE such as adaptive trade-offs and optimality model.