Amy Ando
Dr. Amy W. Ando is Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at The Ohio State University. She earned a B.A. in economics from Williams College in 1990 and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1996. She was a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics from 1999-2023 and before that she worked as a research Fellow in Resources for the Future, where she still has an affiliation as a University Fellow. She was inducted as a Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists in 2023.
Since entering the profession in 1996, Dr. Ando has built a record of scholarly publications related to habitat and species conservation, ecosystem service provision and valuation, and ag-environmental policy. She has had nearly $6 million in grants from sources including the NSF, EPA, and USDA-NIFA. Much of her work appears in top journals of applied economics such as the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE), Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, the Journal of Law and Economics, Land Economics, and Resource and Energy Economics. She has also authored numerous articles in high-impact general interest scientific journals such as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances. To date, Dr. Ando’s publications have garnered over 4,700 citations in Google Scholar. Her seminal 1998 Science paper on species distributions, land values and conservation, which recently surpassed 1,000 citations in Google Scholar, continues to be one of the most highly cited and influential papers on the economics of biodiversity. Her subsequent work extended the analysis in multiple ways, such as accounting for uncertainty in optimal spatial targeting of conservation and considering the values people gain from the ecosystem services of areas protected. By more fully integrating economic principles with conservation biology, Dr. Ando’s work has led to a new understanding of how the spatial distribution of resources and people matter for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management.
Dr. Ando has served her profession extensively beyond producing scholarship. She has been a Co-Editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. During that time she coordinated the AAEA’s work in hosting a USDA-funded small conference on Economics of Inequity in Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Systems which has led to a virtual special issue on that timely topic. She has served as a handling editor for other major journals in her field and worked on numerous review panels for the National Science Foundation. She has served as an elected member of the Board of Directors for the AAEA and as an elected Board member and Vice President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
While Dr. Ando has not held formal Extension appointments, she has always worked to connect her scholarship to the broader public. For example, she is currently a member of the Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources for the National Academies of Sciences and she has provided expert advisory service to agencies and NGOs including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.