Jill Caviglia-Harris, PhD

I am a Professor of Economics in the Economics Department in the Franklin P. Perdue School of Business and the Environmental Studies Department in the Fulton School of Liberal Arts at Salisbury University. My areas of teaching include environmental and natural resource economics and microeconomics.  
 

My research examines the interactions among economic development, environmental change, and human well-being in the Brazilian Amazon. The ecological costs of tropical deforestation are globally significant, contributing to biodiversity loss, climate change, and the degradation of critical ecosystem services. A central question motivating my research is how these global environmental costs compare with the local economic benefits of development, and how public policies can be used to align these competing objectives. To address these questions, I combine long-term field research with large-scale spatial and economic analyses to examine how policies, institutions, and household decision-making shape land-use change, agricultural production, climate resilience, and conservation outcomes. My goal is to generate evidence that informs environmental and development policy at local, regional, and global scales.
 

A second area of my research focuses on economics education. I develop and evaluate innovative instructional approaches that connect students with contemporary economic research, improve engagement and belonging, and make economics more accessible to diverse student populations. This work combines curriculum development with program evaluation to identify effective, scalable strategies for undergraduate teaching.