College of Agriculture & Natural Resources Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics

Major Professor: Mark Skidmore 

Area of Specialization: Energy Economics, Climate Resilience, Applied Econometrics, Geospatial Analysis

Expected Graduation Date: Summer 2026

Personal Website: www.yerimlee.org

Ye-Rim Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate in Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University. She studies how climate shocks and disasters affect energy markets and regional resilience, with a focus on gasoline, hydropower, and infrastructure systems. Her dissertation develops multi-country and high-frequency datasets to examine how wildfires, hurricanes, and droughts shape energy reliability, affordability, and long-term transition planning.

Her job market paper focuses on the short-term impact of wildfires on U.S. retail gasoline markets, using web-scraped station-level data to capture localized price dynamics. This paper received the 2025 M. Jarvin Emerson Student Paper Competition Award from the Mid-Continent Regional Science Association. Beyond her dissertation, Ye-Rim worked with the Inter-American Development Bank to build a multi-country power systems database across Latin America and collaborates on USDA-funded projects examining energy prices, inflation perceptions, and regional disparities.