Prabin Adhikhari
Advisor: Dr. Bachir Kassas
Bio: I am a Ph.D. Student in the Food and Resource Economics Department at the University of Florida. My research lies at the intersection of consumer preferences, behavioral and experimental economics, and health economics, with a focus on the factors shaping food choices and dietary decisions. I design laboratory experiments, surveys, and discrete choice experiments to elicit consumer valuation and willingness-to-pay, pairing incentive-compatible elicitation mechanisms (such as the BDM auction) with cutting-edge biometric methods, including EEG and eye-tracking, to better understand individual decision-making. My job market paper uses a neuroeconomic experiment to examine how attribution bias can nudge consumers toward healthier food. Besides, I study how weather shocks such as extreme heat alter household food purchasing and diet quality using large-scale consumer panel data, and how identity- and reciprocity-based messaging can enhance state agricultural marketing programs in out-of-state markets.
Job Market Paper: Utilizing Attribution Bias to Stimulate Consumer Preferences for Healthy Food: A Neuroeconomic Study
Faith O. Aiya
Advisors: Dr. Lijun Angelia Chen, Dr. Kimberly Morgan
Bio: I am a Ph.D. student in Food and Resource Economics at the University of Florida. My research lies at the intersection of behavioral economics, experimental economics and agrifood marketing, with a focus on how consumers respond to information, marketing interventions, and technology innovations. I investigate how state-sponsored agricultural branding, sustainability and fairness certifications, and other communication interventions influence consumer valuation, preferences, and behaviors. To answer these questions, I design and implement surveys, focus groups, and neuroeconomic experiments to better understand the psychological mechanisms underlying consumer decision-making. I also analyze large-scale consumer panel datasets using advanced econometric methods to identify causal relationships and evaluate the effectiveness of marketing and policy interventions in real-world settings. In addition to my research, I am passionate about teaching, mentoring students, and collaborating across disciplines to address complex challenges in food and agricultural systems.
Job Market Paper: Conceptualizing and Validating State Image: Evidence from State-Sponsored Agricultural Marketing Programs in Out-of-State Markets
Fernando Brito
Advisors: Dr. Gulcan Onel, Dr. Jared Gars
Bio: I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Food and Resource Economics Department at the University of Florida (Ph.D., August 2026). My research sits at the intersection of labor economics, technology adoption, and U.S. agricultural policy, focusing on how technological change is reshaping labor in labor-intensive agriculture. My research leverages large-scale administrative microdata, integrating causal inference frameworks with machine learning methods to answer policyrelevant questions in agribusiness and resource management. Before my doctoral studies I earned an M.S. in Agricultural & Resource Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park and two degrees in Industrial Engineering and Applied Economics from the University of Chile, and I served as a research assistant at the Inter-American Development Bank.
Job Market Paper: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Agricultural Employment
Yetian Cai
Advisor: Dr. Thomas Anderson
Bio: I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Food and Resource Economics Department at the University of Florida. My research examines how agricultural trade policy generates environmental externalities, spanning air pollution from agricultural burning, water nutrient pollution from fertilizer runoff, and deforestation from shrimp aquaculture expansion. Across these projects, I combine large-scale geospatial data (satellite fire and PM2.5 records, land-use panels, hydrological networks, mangrove cover maps) with quasi-experimental designs that
exploit institutional detail to identify the causal effects of national-level policy shocks on localized environmental outcomes.
Job Market Paper: The Unintended Environmental Consequences of Managed Trade Policies: Evidence from the U.S.–Mexico Sugar Suspension Agreement
Shangze (Rudy) Dai
Advisor: Dr. Zhengfei Guan
Bio: Shangze (Rudy) Dai is a Ph.D. candidate in Food and Resource Economics at the University of Florida. His research focuses on the economics of new technology and sustainability, with a particular interest in the economics of artificial intelligence. He combines applied econometrics, causal inference, and mathematical modeling to study how technological change, especially AI and automation, affects firms, agriculture, environmental outcomes, and adaptation to climate risk. He also holds an M.S. in Applied and Computational
Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University.
Job Market Paper: The Economic Value of Precision Agriculture under Drought Risk: Evidence from U.S. Corn Counties
Suraj Gurung
Advisor: Lijun Angelia Chen and Zhifeng Gao
Areas of Research Interest: Experimental & Behavioral Economics, Agribusiness and Marketing, Food Policy, Applied Econometrics
Job Market Paper: "Regulatory Oversight vs. Private Credentials: How Consumers Value Food Safety Signals in Emerging Food Markets”
Suraj's job market paper examines how consumers evaluate food safety signals across traditional restaurants and emerging food concepts, such as home kitchens. Using a discrete choice experiment, he finds that credible private certifications can compensate for the lack of government oversight and largely close the trust gap that otherwise penalizes unregulated kitchens.
Nick Haley
Advisor: Olesya Savchenko
Areas of Research Interest: Environmental Economics, Agricultural Economics, Climate Change Adaptation
Job Market Paper: USA Consumer Demand for Passionfruit: Results from a Choice Experiment
Roberto Koeneke
Advisor: Dr. Christa Court
Bio: I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Florida. My research focus is on natural resource and environmental economics with regional economics applications. My research experience includes nonmarket valuation for aquatic, coastal, and marine resources (e.g., valuation of coastal fisheries and seagrasses, HAB impacts on property prices), and marine/coastal applications of regional economic modeling techniques including economic contribution and economic impact analyses (e.g., Florida’s ocean economy, commercial fishing in Florida).
Job Market Paper: Estimating the capitalization of exposure to harmful algal blooms in property prices in Southwest Florida
Yi (Ellie) Li
Advisor: Dr. Zhengfei Guan
Bio: I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Food and Resource Economics (FRE) department at the University of Florida. My research focuses on international agricultural trade and specialty crop economics, using structural and reduced-form methods to study how trade policy, geopolitical tensions, and technological shocks reshape agricultural markets and land use. Beyond my JMP, I study the structural shift of U.S. agriculture from trade surplus to deficit (published in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy) and examine whether imports threaten or sustain domestic industries facing major disease outbreaks. In research on Florida's citrus greening crisis, I show that imports stabilize, rather than threaten, domestic orange juice supply chains.
Job Market Paper: Geopolitics and the Breakdown of Price Signals in Global Soybean Trade
Abhishek Rajan
Advisor: Olesya Savchenko
Areas of Research Interest: Water Economics and Policy, Climate Change Adaptation, Non-Market Valuation, Applied Econometrics
Md Roknuzzaman
Advisor: Dr. Conner Mullally
Bio: My research focuses on agribusiness, food policy, sustainable food systems, development economics, and impact evaluation. My dissertation, “The Socio-Economic Consequences of Dollar Stores in the United States,” examines how land use regulations and retail expansion shape food access, market competition, and community outcomes. Using large-scale geospatial panel datasets, Chapter 1 applies generalized synthetic control methods to evaluate the causal impact of dollar-store restriction policies on the food-at-home retail environment. Chapter 2 studies the causal effect of dollar-store entry on crime using a spatial “ring-based” difference-in-differences approach, constructing a novel geocoded crime dataset through web scraping. Chapter 3 evaluates how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the food retail environment using a standard difference-in-differences framework. This work involves handling millions of geocoded observations and building reproducible workflows in high-performance computing environments. I conducted this research using R, Python, and ArcGIS on supercomputing systems and employ modern causal inference methods. I bring strong technical training in R, Python, SAS, Stata, and SQL, along with geospatial tools including ArcGIS and GeoDa. I am on the academic job market for postdoctoral and faculty positions in agricultural and applied economics and related fields. I am open to research-focused, teaching positions.