Sandy Sum

Sandy Sum is a Ph.D. candidate in environmental economics studying the distributional impacts of environmental change and policy through the lens of water resources. Her work combines economic theory and empirical methodologies with new data and natural science to investigate: (1) What are the drivers or enablers of environmental inequality? (2) How do environmental policies reshape existing social or environmental inequality? (3) How do heterogeneous individuals respond to environmental risks or policies? 

Her work ranges from causally estimating drought-driven drinking water disparities in California to quantifying global-scale inequalities in economic dependence on atmospheric moisture recycling. Her job market paper is the first paper to comprehensively evaluate the efficiency and social equity impacts of policy counterfactuals under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), using restricted-access farm-level data.

Originally from Singapore, Sandy is trilingual and holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the National University of Singapore, as well as a Master's degree in Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to her Ph.D. program, she worked as a research analyst at the Global Policy Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Professor Solomon Hsiang.

Google Scholar Profile (URL: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Mctc_xgAAAAJ&hl=en)