Expected Graduation Year: 2026
Empirical Industrial Organization
Environmental Economics
Transportation Economics
Email: gordonjgz "at" gmail.com
Climate change is increasing weather variability, leading to greater fluctuations in water demand and more unstable revenues for utility companies. Utilities must pre-set a fixed Increasing Block Pricing (IBP) structure to navigate trade-offs between cost recovery, conservation, and equity—tensions that are intensified by growing weather variance. This paper evaluates how changes in precipitation variability affect a utility’s Ramsey pricing problem and assesses the associated welfare implications. Using panel data on monthly household water utility transactions from Austin, TX (2018–2019), I estimate demand elasticity through a structural discrete-continuous choice (DCC) model that accounts for nonlinear budget constraints. In counterfactual simulations, I solve the Ramsey pricing problem under varying levels of precipitation variance. Results show that under high precipitation variance, if the utility prioritizes progressive distributional goals, the optimal pricing structure not only enhances equity but also reduces revenue risk. This occurs because de-emphasizing revenue contributions from high-income households introduces concavity into the utility’s revenue preference function—effectively embedding risk aversion. Conversely, under low precipitation variance, pursuing progressive goals flattens the utility’s revenue preference, making it more risk-neutral.
Many economic research studies have been focusing on the demand and welfare estimation of the ride-hailing market, specifically for platforms like Uber and Lyft. In this paper, I estimate the welfare effect of UberPool as a new product in the ride-hailing market accounting for heterogeneous preferences within and across locations by using a discrete-type random coefficient nested logit model. I find that, relative to the counterfactual worlds without UberPool, UberPool can increase consumer surplus by 31.58% - 33.51%. Even a partially accessible UberPool by location is 2.57% higher on consumer surplus, compared to if only UberX were provided but with lower prices, which shows the magnitude of the variety effect in the ride-hailing market.
Tolled roads in the US have been using a dynamic pricing mechanism to react to fluctuating demand, which essentially forms price discrimination on the value of time (VOT), incentivizing high VOT users to use the more expensive toll lanes to save time and vice versa. In this paper, I explored this price discrimination on VOT with two common infrastructure constraints: 1. a fixed free price on the slow lanes, and 2. the fast and slow lanes are not perfect substitutes in terms of their exits. Following existing research, I developed a structural model for optimal tolls to maximize consumer welfare. In addition, I also conducted a counterfactual analysis to explore the welfare effects of different policies on toll designs and infrastructural investments.
Served as an Assistant Instructor for sections with 100+ undergraduate students on average, with bi-weekly lectures of 75 minutes in the long semester. This course is a required upper-level economics course for economics majors with the target grade of at least a C-. The content of the course includes interpretation of economic data, introduction to statistical models, estimation, basic data analysis in R, and inference in economics.