Justin Gallagher

Justin Gallagher  is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Montana State University. Dr. Gallagher received a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, a MA in Public Policy from the University of Chicago, and a BA in International Politics and Economics from Middlebury College.  Dr. Gallagher’s primary research field is environmental economics, with a broad interest in household finance and public economics. The central theme of his research is investigating how individuals evaluate and respond to environmental risks.  Dr. Gallagher’s past research includes using a housing market model to evaluate how individuals value the cleanup of hazardous waste under the Superfund Program, and a project that provides new evidence on how individuals update their expectations of their flood risk using insurance purchase information from the National Flood Insurance Program. Current work includes a methodological paper that shows the importance of carefully accounting for missing data in a popular weather damage database, and a project that models and tests whether regions in the US with more well-developed local banking institutions at the time of a natural disaster have greater post-disaster lending. Dr. Gallagher’s work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, The American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, The American Economic Journal: Public Policy, and The Journal of Public Economics.