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Claire Fan

Ph.D. Candidate
University of Chicago
claireqfan (at) uchicago.edu


Welcome! I am a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. My research uses applied microeconomics to study the consequences and political economy of natural resource management, especially in developing countries. Please reach out if you’d like to discuss research!

My work has been supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and EPIC DRW Fellowship.

I am on the 2025-26 job market.

Research

Working Papers

  1. Dam Thy Neighbor: International Relations and the Externalities of Impounding Rivers (Job market paper) [draft coming soon]
    Using the context of dams around the globe, this paper provides the first quantification of how international relations shape transboundary environmental externalities. Leveraging a novel measure of dam exposure in a difference-in-differences framework, I find that dams lead to reductions in downstream growth in nighttime lights, both within and across borders, on the order of 2% of average growth over 2001-2013. Next, I compile quantitative measures of bilateral relations motivated by theories of cross-country cooperation. I find that the transboundary externalities of dams are driven by country pairs in which the downstream country has high coordination costs with or little geopolitical leverage on its upstream neighbor. When coordination costs are low, the externalities are mitigated to null. Among various measures of bilateral relations, joint membership in international institutions most strongly predicts the mitigation of transboundary externalities. As recent dams have predominantly been built in developing regions, these results uncover the role played by international relations in economic development, through the management of transboundary natural resources.

Work in Progress

  1. Environmental Degradation in One's Own Backyard: Who Gains and Who Loses from Sand Mining in India
    with Sushant Banjara and Varun K

  2. Rural Household Water Access in India
    with Devika Lakhote

Teaching