Peiley Lau
Bio: Peiley is a Ph.D. student in Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley and a recipient of the UC Berkeley Chancellor's Fellowship. Peiley has taught cooking and nutrition to middle-schoolers in underserved communities and worked on a small Minnesotan family farm and dairy. Prior to Berkeley, she did policy research at policy think tank Oakland Institute where she looked at the impacts of palm oil and biofuel land grabs on rural smallholder livelihoods in South East Asia and Africa. She co-authored a report on exposing tax evasion and timber transfer pricing by foreign logging companies in Papua New Guinea. She graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Economics.
Research: Her current doctoral research focuses on two main areas of work: (1) impact of intensive agricultural systems on public health and the environment, and monitoring of agricultural pollution (from fertilizer, animal waste, and pesticides) to improve regulatory oversight; and (2) extent of corporate tax evasion and non-compliance with environmental regulations by extractive firms, focusing on the oil and gas industry.
Fields of Interest: Environmental Economics, Extractive Resources, Agricultural Policy, Water Pollution, Public Finance, Tax Evasion, Remote Sensing, Spatial Analysis