I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics and Environmental Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I will be on the job market in AY 2024-2025.
My research investigates how environmental change and policies shape and are shaped by patterns of social and economic inequalities. I combine new data with economic theory, empirical methods, and natural science to examine these interactions. My recent projects have focused on quantifying the social equity outcomes of water scarcity and regulation in California.
My job market paper is the first to comprehensively evaluate the efficiency and reallocative impacts of policy counterfactuals under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, using restricted-access farm-level data.
Originally from Singapore, I am trilingual and hold 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. Before starting my Ph.D. program, I worked as a research analyst at the Global Policy Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Professor Solomon Hsiang.
Email: sandysum@ucsb.edu
Advisor: Tamma Carleton
Committee: Kyle Meng, Olivier Deschênes, Chris Costello
In my free time, you can probably find me climbing!
