Personal Summary

Katrina Mullan studies the relationships between environmental quality and human health and wellbeing, with a current focus on Brazil, Central America, and the Northwest United States. She uses household surveys and remote sensing data to conduct quantitative empirical analyses, often within interdisciplinary teams.  Dr. Mullan has published in journals such as Environmental and Resource Economics, Ecological Economics, the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, and World Development. She joined the University of Montana in 2012 to teach courses in the economics of the environment, health and global development. Dr. Mullan has a PhD in Environment and Development Economics from Cambridge University, and previously advised on environmental policy for the UK government and the European Environment Agency.

Education

2009, Cambridge University, PHD

2001, University of London, MSc

2000, Cambridge University, BA

Courses Taught

Fall 2023: 

ECNS 433 - Economics of the Environment

Classes I regularly teach in other semesters:

ECNS 491 - ST: Health Economics and Policy

ECNS 560 - Advanced Econometrics

ECNS 450 - Economics of Global Development

ECNS 201 - Principles of Microeconomics

Research Interests

I study how people make decisions in response to environmental change or environmental policy. I primarily use quantitative empirical methods, relying particularly on spatially-referenced panel datasets. This research falls within the following overlapping themes:

Agricultural expansion into tropical forests

Smallholder decisions about use of land and other resources have important environmental implications both globally (e.g. climate change, biodiversity loss) and locally (e.g. erosion, water reliability). My research examines the potential implications of agricultural conversion and intensification for poverty alleviation and ecosystem service provision, particularly in relation to water. I focus on three specific questions:  

(1) What are the impacts of deforestation on smallholder incomes and local ecosystem services?

(2) How are smallholder land use decisions affected by changes in household wealth, market development, climate and local ecosystem services?

(3) How effective are alternative policy mechanisms for forest protection?

More information on this work in the Brazilian Amazon can be found at the "Connections between Water and Rural Production" website. 

Responses to environmental risks

Health impacts of natural disasters or environmental pollutants depend on how individuals or families understand and respond to the risks they face. I study the actions of people faced with indoor air pollution, wildfires, droughts or floods, to assess the relative importance of information, attitudes and financial or technical constraints in determing behavioral responses to health risks. 

Food-Energy-Water Nexus

Improving the sustainability of food, energy and water systems requires understanding how they are connected. I study how land use choices link these systems, including how deforestation for agriculture alters farm productivity via impacts on rainfall and streamflow, and how rural energy provision affects agricultural practices. 

Environment and migration

I study the impacts of environmental conditions on migration decisions, and the outcomes for land use change. This includes effects of resource depletion on migration to new frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon, effects of climate-related natural disasters on rural-urban migration in Thailand, and how presence of natural amenities such as public lands, lakes and rivers or mountains influences population and housing growth in the northwest US. 

Field of Study

Environmental Economics; Health Economics; Development Economics; Applied Econometrics

Selected Publications

Hansen, A. J., Mullan, K., Theobald, D. M., Robinson, N., East, A., & Powell, S. (2022). Informing conservation decisions to target private lands of highest ecological value and risk of loss. Ecological Applications, e2612

Mullan, K., J. Caviglia-Harris, E. Sills (2021) “Sustainability of agricultural production following deforestation in the tropics: Evidence on the value of newly-deforested, long-deforested and forested land in the Brazilian Amazon” Land Use Policy, Vol. 108. 

Caviglia-Harris, J., T. Biggs, E. Ferreira, D. W. Harris, K. Mullan, E. O. Sills (2021) “The color of water: The contributions of green and blue water to agricultural productivity in the Western Brazilian Amazon” World Development, Vol. 146.

Hansen, A., K. Mullan, D. Theobald, N. Robinson, A. East (2021) “Natural vegetation cover on private lands: locations and risk of loss in the northwestern United States” Ecosphere, Vol 12(10)

Wu, Y., K. Mullan, T. Biggs, J. Caviglia-Harris, D. Harris, E. Sills (2021) "Do Forests Provide Watershed Services for Farmers in the Humid Tropics? Evidence from the Brazilian Amazon" Ecological Economics, Vol. 183.

Reisig, D., K. Mullan, A. Hansen, S. Powell, D. Theobald and R. Ulrich (2021) "Natural amenities and low-density residential development: Magnitude and spatial scale of influences" Land Use Policy, Vol 102.

De Sales, F., Santiago, T., Biggs, T. W., Mullan, K., Sills, E. O., & Monteverde, C. (2020) Impacts of Protected Area Deforestation on Dry‐season Regional Climate in the Brazilian Amazon. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 125(16)

Mullan, K., E. Sills, S. Pattanayak and J. Caviglia-Harris (2018) “Converting Forests to Farms: The Economic Benefits of Clearing Forests in Agricultural Settlements in the Amazon” Environmental and Resource Economics, Vol. 71(2), pp 427-455

Young, J., N. Anderson, H. Naughton and K. Mullan (2018) “Economic and policy factors driving adoption of institutional woody biomass heating systems in the US” Energy Economics, Vol. 69, pp 456-470.

Caviglia-Harris, J., E. Sills, A. Bell, D. Harris, K. Mullan and D. Roberts (2016) “Busting the Boom–Bust Pattern of Development in the Brazilian Amazon” World Development, Vol. 79, pp 82-96

Liu, C., K. Mullan, H. Liu, W. Zhu and Q. Rong (2014) “The estimation of long term impacts of China’s key priority forestry programs on rural household incomes” Journal of Forest Economics, Vol 20(3), pp 267-285

Mullan, K., E. Sills and S. Bauch (2014) “The reliability of retrospective data on asset ownership as a measure of past household wealth” Field Methods, Vol 26(3), pp223-238

Caviglia-Harris, J., E. Sills and K. Mullan (2013) “Migration and Mobility on the Amazon Frontier” Population and Environment, Vol. 34 (3), pp 338-369

Ferraro, P., K. Lawlor, K. Mullan and S. Pattanayak (2012) “Forest figures: Ecosystem services valuation and policy evaluation in developing countries” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Vol. 6 (1), pp 20-44

Mullan, K. and A. Kontoleon (2012) “Participation in Payments for Ecosystem Services programs: accounting for participant heterogeneity” Journal of Environmental Economics and Policy, Vol. 1 (3), pp 235-254

Caviglia-Harris, J., S. Hall, K. Mullan, C.MacIntyre, S. Bauch, D. Harris, E. Sills, J. Dawson, B. Klitch, D. Roberts, M. Toomey and H. Cha (2012) “Improving Household Surveys Through Computer Assisted Data Collection. Use of Touchscreen Laptops in Challenging Environments” Field Methods, Vol. 24, pp 74-94

Mullan, K., P. Grosjean and A. Kontoleon (2011) “Land tenure arrangements and rural-urban migration in China” World Development, Vol. 39(1), pp123-133.