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CRES Affiliated Scholar Seunghoon Lee, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri Columbia, recently sat down with Senior Strategic Communications Consultant John Fougere to discuss his professional path and what motivates him as a researcher.
What led you to pursue a career in higher education and more specifically, to become a researcher in areas like econometrics, and environmental economics?
I have always cherished the freedom to work on questions that genuinely interest me and that I believe are socially useful—or, at the very least, socially harmless! Much of economics is about private incentives: how people and firms respond to opportunities to make themselves better off. What I love about environmental economics is that we use those same principles to address socially important questions, often involving things that markets tend to underprovide (e.g., clean air). In that sense, I like to think that my work itself generates a small positive externality. The questions I find interesting are also socially important and often understudied, and that combination makes the research especially rewarding to me.
What brought you to the University of Missouri, and how did you become affiliated with CRES?
I earned my PhD in the Midwest, in Chicago, and really came to appreciate the simplicity of life here. Missouri was therefore a natural fit for me. Given my research interests in energy and environmental economics, as well as the wonderful group of colleagues at CRES, becoming affiliated with the center was also a very natural progression.
How would you describe your overall research focus?
Thematically, I study a wide range of issues in energy and environmental economics, including food waste, floods, wildfires, extreme temperatures, transmission lines, and renewable energy facilities. While these topics may seem unrelated, they share common economic themes. I tend to approach them through a Beckerian lens: many things that matter to people do not have explicit market or prices, but they still carry implicit costs and benefits that shape behavior. A recurring theme in my research is to use observed choices to uncover these hidden costs and understand how people respond to them.
What is one research project that you are most proud of?
My newest working paper was featured in The New York Times this week, which was a particularly exciting and rewarding experience.
The paper shows that recurring caregiving shocks can lead to reductions in maternal employment. So how is this environmental economics? We use wildfire smoke as a trigger for caregiving shocks and empirically show that smoke exposure increases school closures and student absenteeism, creating unexpected childcare needs for parents.
More broadly, the paper reflects a theme that runs through much of my research: the economic costs of environmental disasters can extend far beyond their most visible, direct effects. You do not have to become sick from wildfire smoke to be affected by it—if schools close, parents may suddenly be unable to work. Similarly, in my work on flooding, I find that even households whose homes are not physically damaged can bear meaningful costs because flooding disrupts mobility and daily routines. These less visible costs are easy to overlook, but they can be economically significant. Understanding and measuring them is something I find particularly important.
Finally, what is an ongoing research project that you are excited about?
One observation I have about the energy transition is that discussions of its economic and social consequences tend to focus either on aggregate societal impacts or on declining industries, such as the fossil fuel sector. What frustrates me as a researcher is how little attention is paid to the communities that actually host new energy infrastructure (often rural communities) even though these projects can have enormous effects on those places and the people who live there.
I have a series of projects aimed at filling this gap. In one, we use remote-sensing techniques and satellite imagery to reconstruct the historical expansion of transmission lines. With this data, we hope to provide objective and credible evidence on the social and economic impacts of transmission infrastructure and ultimately contribute to more evidence-based policymaking.
In another project, we study how solar farms, which can provide a steady stream of income to landowners, affect farmers and rural communities more broadly. Together, these projects are intended to better understand how the benefits and costs of the energy transition are distributed across the communities experiencing it most directly.
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