Kirstin Munro

Kirstin Munro
Economist, Portland OR.

Background

I am an applied economist and statistician with ten years of experience managing and analyzing large datasets. The major theme of my research is the complex and overlapping relationships between people, the economy, and the environment. I am interested in questions related to:

  • The production, distribution, and consumption of energy, and its relationship to environmental problems;
  • Labor, both paid and unpaid, and its relationship to consumption and production processes;
  • The economic growth and development of regions, and its relationship to social, economic, and environmental problems; and
  • Critiques of popular individual, firm, and government-scale sustainability efforts.

Complex problems demand interdisciplinary reasoning to overcome the weaknesses inherent in any single field of study. While my research is grounded in a disciplinary perspective thanks to my graduate training in economics, both the methods and substance of my work are shaped by insights from relevant social research and economic inquiry outside the mainstream.

I am actively engaged in projects related to residential energy demand, the labor market impacts of regional economic development policies, and the relationship between land-use law and changing patterns of consumption. Some of my past research includes topics related to immigrant wages, immigrant language choice, infant mortality, property taxes, the cost of regulatory compliance, consumer behavior in regulated industries, and hedonic models of property values near power generation facilities.

Research Interests

  • Primary: Labor, Energy and Regulated Industries, Culture and Consumption
  • Secondary: History of Economic Thought, Feminist Economics

Personal

  • I live in Portland with my Cardigan Welsh corgi, Wilson.
  • In my free time, I'm teaching my dog dance routines to obscure 1980s pop songs and trying to eat my vegetables.
  • I love flexidiscs and fanzines and the international pop underground.