Ha Vu received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, San Diego in 2024. She holds a Master of Science in finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Colorado State University, USA.
Her research interests revolve around the intersection of development and the environment. Specifically, her work focuses on the impact of various environmental issues on some of the most vulnerable communities in developing regions. Some recurrent themes in her research include studying the transborder impact of dam construction in upstream countries on downstream water discharge, salinity intrusion, and agricultural productivity, as well as the impact of air pollution on individual risk aversion and household decision-making, and the impact of greening trade on the labor market in export-led developing countries. Ha often addresses her research questions with an empirical approach, specializing in remote sensing data using Geospatial Information System (GIS) methods.
Since August 2024, she has joined the Economics Frontiers Program at IIASA as a Research Scholar. Here, she is involved in two major research projects: MultiFutures and JUSTCOAL. While MultiFutures’ goals are multifold, her major contribution to this project is to establish a set of “Beyond GDP” indicators to assess the potential for achieving a climate-neutral, just, and resilient society. Meanwhile, JUSTCOAL examines how transitions out of coal should be structured at a regional level so as to best preserve or enhance the populations’ welfare. Ha will work in particular on identifying the different drivers of a just energy transition and estimate the distributional impacts of this process on households and individuals.
Parallelly, Ha has also been working as a Short-term Consultant at the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice since December 2022. She contributes to several research on the distributional impact of trade and trade policies on the local labor market, including an empirical study using data from Vietnam.