I hold a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech, with a specialization in environmental economics and applied econometrics. My research focuses on non-market valuation, with interests in water policy, habitat restoration, and land use under environmental constraints. My current work estimates public willingness to pay for habitat restoration on farmland that may be retired under California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. I also study birdwatchers' preferences for grassland habitat restoration in California. Through this work, I aim to provide rigorous economic evidence to inform sustainable water management, land retirement, and conservation policy.
Roshan Puri
Postdoctoral Scholar
Environmental and resource economics
I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Watershed Sciences, University of California, Davis, working in close collaboration with the USDA Agricultural Research Service's Sustainable Agricultural Water Systems Research Unit. My research examines land, water, and conservation decisions using environmental economics and applied econometric methods.
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About
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Research Interests
Applied econometrics and stated-preference methods
Agricultural water and public land use
Recreation demand and conservation policy
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Research / Publications
Working Papers
Birdwatchers' Willingness to Pay for Grassland Habitat Restoration in California
2026 | Working paper
Grassland birds are experiencing some of the steepest and most persistent declines in North America. In California, more than 60% of historic grasslands and oak savannahs have been lost, further intensifying pressure on already vulnerable bird communities. Despite the ecological and economic importance of these ecosystems, grassland conservation remains underrepresented in the non-market valuation literature, and little is known about how birdwatchers value habitat protection and restoration. This study estimates birdwatchers' willingness to pay for grassland habitat restoration in California to inform conservation planning and funding decisions.
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From Fields to Flyways: Public Willingness to Pay for Migratory Bird Habitat Restoration in California
2026 | Under review
California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) requires groundwater basins to achieve sustainable use by 2040, a transition projected to retire 500,000 to 1 million acres of irrigated farmland. Virtually all of this retired land will be in California's great Central Valley, an agricultural powerhouse and part of the Pacific Flyway, a major north-south route for both wetland and dryland migratory birds. In California, over 95% of native wetlands and 60% of grasslands and oak savannahs have been lost, making SGMA-driven land retirement a rare opportunity to restore wildlife habitat at scale. Realizing this opportunity requires substantial public investment, yet the public value of habitat restoration on retired farmland remains unquantified. We estimate household willingness to pay (WTP) for converting SGMA-retired farmland to permanent wetland and dryland habitat using a contingent valuation (CV) survey of California households. We find mean WTP of approximately $50 to $67 per household for wetland restoration and $49 to $61 for dryland restoration, aggregating conservatively to one-time statewide benefits of $563 million to $773 million depending on program type, estimation approach, and distributional assumptions. These results demonstrate broad public support for habitat restoration on SGMA-retired farmland and provide an empirical basis for evaluating and allocating public investment across competing restoration alternatives.
Economic Benefits of Aquatic Invasive Species Management in Freshwater Systems: A Contingent Valuation Study
2026 | Revise and Resubmit
Aquatic invasive species (AIS) cause significant ecological and economic impacts, including habitat damage, degradation of water quality, reduced recreational opportunities, and risks to human health. While many of these effects are well documented, less is known about how the general public perceives and engages with AIS in regions with significant freshwater infestations. To this end, we conducted surveys of general residents and members of a lake advocacy organization in Minnesota, USA, a state where over half of its waters (by area) are affected by AIS, with the objective of estimating the economic benefits of managing AIS populations. Using a single-bounded trichotomous-choice question, we asked respondents whether they would support an annual increase in property tax or rent, with the generated revenue earmarked for AIS prevention, control, and containment. We conservatively estimate that general households are willing to pay $35–$40 per year, while lake association members are willing to pay $64–$75 per year to support AIS management efforts. These results indicate strong public support for this conservation program, especially among those with direct connections to the affected systems, including recreational users, members of the community organization, and those who trust resource managers. From a policy perspective, our findings have two implications. First, they can help policymakers and resource managers more effectively target financial and outreach strategies. Second, the willingness to pay (WTP) estimates provide a foundation for incorporating public preferences into conservation funding decisions.
Publications
A Review of Residential Water Conservation Policies and Attempts to Measure Their Effectiveness
2024 | PLOS Water
With escalating global water scarcity and increasing pressures on freshwater resources, demand-side management has emerged as a crucial tool for sustainable water resource management. This paper reviews residential, demand-side water management strategies, focusing primarily on price mechanisms. We trace the evolution of price structures and attempts to estimate consumer responses under these structures, highlighting the methodological and practical difficulties with estimating elasticity under non-linear billing structures. We also include a tertiary review of previous research into non-pecuniary strategies, such as restrictions, and information/education campaigns. This review serves as a primer for policymakers, water managers, and researchers seeking to design and evaluate demand-side management in residential water use.
Locally-Weighted Meta-Regression and Benefit Transfer
2023 | Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
Meta-regression models (MRMs) are commonly used within benefit transfer to estimate willingness to pay for environmental quality improvements. In virtually all benefit transfers of this type, a single regression model is fit to all source points in the metadata, and used to produce out-of-sample predictions for all possible policy-site applications. Despite the advantages of this approach over other types of benefit transfer, the predictive accuracy of these MRMs generally leaves room for improvement. In this paper we propose a locally-weighted regression approach to MRM estimation to enhance the accuracy of benefit transfer predictions in an environmental valuation context. We introduce the concept of locally-weighted meta-regression, provide econometric underpinnings, and discuss the construction of weight functions. We illustrate the use of cross-validation to decide between weight functions, and show how this framework can be applied in an actual benefit transfer setting. For our empirical application on willingness-to-pay for water quality improvements, we find that the proposed approach brings substantial gains in predictive accuracy in a leave-one-out setting, and measurable improvements in predictive efficiency for benefit transfer.
Evaluating the Sensitivity of Residential Water Demand Estimation to Model Specification and Instrument Choices
2020 | Water Resources Research
There is a substantial body of work that estimates residential water demand as a function of price, household characteristics, and weather. While most results suggest demand is inelastic, researchers have found qualitatively different estimates of price elasticity—both elastic (>1) and inelastic (<1). Inconsistency in the choice of the price signal, its instruments, and appropriate weather variables across studies makes it difficult to determine if the differences in elasticity estimates are real—due to location characteristics—or an artifice of model specification. Predicting accurate demand responses to price changes enables water utilities to stabilize and anticipate future revenue while meeting conservation goals. However, specifying residential water demand with the appropriate model (under block rate structure) is challenging for three reasons: (1) uncertainty around the appropriate price signal, (2) a lack of theoretical motivation for determining which (and how) weather variables affect demand, and (3) simultaneity issues in estimation require the use of instruments, which vary across studies. Therefore, to elucidate the effects of model choices on elasticity, we use a single location and systematically vary the specification of price, instruments, and weather variables across a suite of models. We reaffirm past results that households respond to the average price. We find reasonably stable and robust estimates of price elasticity across different weather and price instrument specification—with some notable exceptions—implying that low-cost information like average temperature is sufficient to accurately reflect the data-generating process, reducing costs and allowing for a parsimonious model.
Projects in Development
Nonprice Rationing on Congested Public Lands: Evidence from Reservation Systems in U.S. National Parks
2026 | Project in development
This project aims to examine how reservation and timed-entry systems affect visitation patterns across U.S. national parks. As agencies increasingly rely on these policies to manage congestion, the study will provide evidence on how quantity-based access systems perform when price-based rationing is constrained by legal, political, or equity considerations.
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Residential Water Demand Estimation Metadata Compilation
2026 | Project in development
This project develops a meta-analysis of residential water demand spanning more than two decades of empirical studies. It aims to explain variation in estimated price elasticities by identifying how pricing structures, conservation mandates, climate conditions, and institutional context shape household water use responses, while building a structured basis for policy transfer to guide water utility planning and conservation program design.
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CV
A current curriculum vitae is available here.
View CV05
Contact
Emailrpuri@ucdavis.edu
AffiliationUniversity of California, Davis
ProfilesGoogle Scholar / LinkedIn
AvailabilityAvailable for research collaborations, invited seminars, conference participation, and policy engagement.