Aaron Strong

Aaron Strong
Senior Economist; Professor, Pardee RAND Graduate School
Santa Monica Office

Education

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

Overview

Aaron Strong is an economist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School. As an applied microeconomist who specializes in environmental and natural resource economics, his recent work has focused on developing 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 US 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.

Selected Publications

Aaron Strong, Tedeja Gracner, Peggy Chen and Kandice Kapinos, "On the Value of the Umbilical Cord Blood Supply", Value in Health (forthcoming)

Bond, Craig A., Aaron Strong, Nicholas E. Burger, Sarah Weilant, Uzaib Saya, and Anita Chandra, Resilience Dividend Valuation Model: Framework Development and Initial Case Studies, RAND Corporation (RR-2129-RF), 2017

Barnes, Stephen R.; Bond, Craig; Burger, Nicholas; Anania, Kate; Strong, Aaron; Weilant, Sarah; and Virgets, Stephanie, "Economic Evaluation of Coastal Land Loss in Louisiana," Journal of Ocean and Coastal Economcis, 4(1), 2017

Eric Tate, Aaron Strong, Travis Kraus, and Haoyi Xiong, "Flood Recovery and Property Acquisition in Cedar Rapids, Iowa," Natural Hazards, 80(3), 2016

Aaron Strong and Christopher Goemans, "The Impact of Real-time Quantity Information on Residential Water Demand," Water Resources and Economics, 10, 2015

H. Allen Klaiber, V. Kerry Smith, Michael Kaminsky and Aaron Strong, "Measuring Price Elasticities for Residential Water Demand with Limited Information," Land Economics, 90(1), 2014

Aaron Strong and Christopher Goemans, "Quantity Uncertainty and Demand: The Case of Water Smart Reader Ownership,," B.E. Journal of Policy Analysis and Economcis, 14(3), 2014

Honors & Awards

  • Bronze Medal (2016), RAND
  • Bronze Medeal (2020), RAND
  • Mentor Award (2021), RAND

Commentary

Publications