Amy W Ando

Biography

Ando is a Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics. She earned a B.A. in economics from Williams College in 1990 and a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T in 1996. Prior to joining the faculty at Illinois she worked as a Fellow at Resources for the Future for three years, and she is now a University Fellow at Resources for the Future. Ando has studied numerous topics in environmental and natural resource economics but her research focuses primarily on the economics of species and habitat conservation. That work includes research to inform optimal conservation planning, descriptive analyses of actual private and public conservation behavior, and research to improve aquatic habitat through better stormwater management policy; a recent set of papers works to develop tools for spatial conservation portfolio choice to reduce the uncertainty in conservation outcomes from climate climate change. Her research has been funded by grants from several sources including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture - NIFA. Papers emerging from her research have appeared in Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Land Economics, Resource and Energy Economics, the Journal of Law and Economics, Conservation Biology, Conservation Letters, and numerous other scholarly journals and books. Ando has served as a handling editor for three highly ranked journals in her field. She has worked on major review panels for multidisciplinary grant competitions at the National Science Foundation and participated in expert advisory workshops related to stormwater and wildlife habitat policy for the EPA and the USDA (respectively). Ando served for several years on the Advisory Committee for the Environment Program at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and on advisory groups to help the City of Chicago form and evaluate stormwater initiatives.

Research Interest

She works primarily on problems of species and land conservation, including conservation portfolio design, cost-effective reserve-site selection, conservation benefit valuation, and understanding the relationship between private and public conservation activity. She has also studied other topics related to environmental policy and political economy such as: enforcement of natural resource damage liability statutes; the determinants of household recycling behavior and rain-barrel adoption; and the welfare effects of ethanol policy.