Post-Doctoral Fellows

Arnab Mitra is an applied microeconomist with emphasis in environmental & resource economics and experimental economics. His work focuses on the politics of environmental enforcements for the Clean Air Act in the United States. In particular, he examines how the political affiliation of a local Congressman or state Senator impacts the enforcement of the Clean Air Act in his/her jurisdiction. His experimental work examines whether a perceived norm based off of peers’ behavior influences individual decision making in strategic situations, in absence of any monitoring or social sanction. He is currently conducting follow-up experiments in the United States and India. He graduated from the University of Arizona with a doctoral degree in economics in May, 2010. Prior to that, he attended the Jawaharlal Nehru University (India) for his Masters' and M. Phil degrees in Economics. He also worked at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations and in economics projects sponsored.

Laurie Kaye Nijaki is a Erb Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on the sustainable city, with a particular interest in green economic development. She most recently served as the State of California's principal adviser on green economy research, and spearheaded the implementation of a groundbreaking $500-million community-benefits-agreement for Environmental Defense Fund. She holds a Ph.D. in Policy, Planning, and Development from the University of Southern California, where she earned the University's most prestigious fellowship for doctoral studies totaling over $115,000 in research funding and served as her school's doctoral valedictory speaker; a M.A. in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles where her studies were fully funded by the Erin Brockovich Fellowship in Environmental Justice; and a B.A. in Political Science summa cum laude from the Early Entrance Program at California State University, Los Angeles, where she graduated college at the age of 18.