Senior Economist, RAND; Professor of Policy Analysis, RAND School of Public Policy
Aaron Strong is a senior economist at RAND and professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy. Through his training in environmental and natural resource economics, he has focused on developing models to estimate the impact of disasters and disaster recovery on economies, a framework for estimating the value of the resilience dividend, a landscape survey of decision support tools for flood risk mitigation, estimating the impact of oil and natural gas prices on development and extraction, and estimating the value of natural capital in a western rangeland. He has used his work on computable general equilibrium models to help Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands estimate future prices stemming from recovery efforts. In addition to the environmental work, he has estimated the macroeconomic impact of a variety of different policies and programs including land loss in Louisiana, changes to workers' compensation in California, Medicaid expansion, and changes to regulations for oil and gas refineries in California. Currently, his interest is centered on better understanding the financial landscape for resilience and sustainability investments and how to crowd in private sector investments. Strong earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Previously, he held faculty positions at the University of Iowa and the University of Wyoming. In addition, he had post-docs with the G8 Legacy Chair in Wildlife Ecology at the University of Calgary and the Center for Environmental Economics and Sustainability Policy at Arizona State University.
Ph.D. in economics, University of Colorado; M.A. in economics, University of Colorado; M.S. in applied mathematics, University of Colorado; B.A. in mathematics, Luther College
