Andrew Hobbs

Assistant Professor, University of San Francisco

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I am a development and environmental economist studying how people cope with droughts, floods, and other environmental shocks. I am particularly interested in how household power structures lead the costs of those shocks to be unevenly distributed. Much of my research relies on linking satellite data with ground-based survey datasets to study how droughts affect people, their crops, and natural landscapes.

Before starting my PhD, I lived and worked for several years in Mozambique studying climate smart agriculture. Prior to that, I worked on renewable energy and energy efficiency policy in the U.S., Germany, and China.

Selected Publications

  1. Gender and Culture Shape Prosociality More than Heat Stress in a Five-Country Experiment
    Alessandra Cassar, Jesse Anttila-Hughes, Francesco Bogliacino, and 13 more authors
    PNAS Nexus, 2026
    Forthcoming
  2. Refractive Error Correction and Harvest Worker Productivity in the Guatemalan Coffee Sector: A Quasi-experimental Analysis
    Bryce Everett, Brad Wong, Erwin Herdocia, and 7 more authors
    Global Public Health, 2026
  3. Insuring those who bear the risk: The impact of gender-inclusive framing on insurance uptake in Kenya
    Julian Arteaga, Michael R Carter, and Andrew Hobbs
    World Development, 2026
  4. Get in the Zone: The Risk-Adjusted Welfare Effects of Data-Driven vs. Administrative Borders for Index Insurance Zones
    Ella Kirchner, Elinor Benami, Andrew Hobbs, and 2 more authors
    Journal of Development Economics, 2025
  5. The Distribution of Energy Efficiency and Regional Inequality
    Andrew Hobbs and Puja Singhal
    The Energy Journal, 2023
    Awarded Campbell Watkins Paper for the best paper in The Energy Journal in 2023
  6. Uniting remote sensing, crop modelling and economics for agricultural risk management
    Elinor Benami, Zhenong Jin, Michael R. Carter, and 4 more authors
    Nature Reviews: Earth & Environment, 2021

Research in Progress

Insuring the Family or the Asset? The Impact of Product Framing on Demand Under review

Do Droughts Drive Deforestation?: Evidence from Mozambique

Impact of Agricultural Policies on Crop Residue Burning in India with Kajal Gulati

With big data come big problems: pitfalls in measuring basis risk for crop index insurance with Matthieu Stigler, Apratim Dey, and David Lobell

Financial Literacy and Entrepreneurial Aspirations: Results from Pilot Experiments in India, Peru, and Uganda with Ester Agasha, Akash Shaji, and Bruce Wydick