About

Ellen Bruno is an Associate Professor of Cooperative Extension in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley. Her work focuses on applied research and outreach related to economic and policy issues affecting California's agriculture and natural resources. As a UC extension economist, she collaborates with government agencies, environmental and community groups, the agricultural sector, and other stakeholders to connect Californians with the University's research. Cooperative Extension emphasizes providing research-based information to empower local decision-makers by bridging local issues with rigorous research. Much of Professor Bruno's research evaluates the potential for and effectiveness of various policies for managing water resources. Her recent projects include estimating how agricultural pumpers respond to changes in groundwater prices over time and investigating the factors that drive collective action and the choice of policy instruments for groundwater management in California. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Davis, and a B.S. in Management Science from the University of California, San Diego.

Research topics

• Economics
• Natural resource economics
• Agricultural economics
• Geography
• Business
• Environmental science
• Microeconomics
• Ecology
• Medicine
• Geology
• Fishery
• Biology
• Industrial organization
• Agroforestry
• Finance
• Water resource management
• Development economics
• Economic growth
• Environmental planning
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Externalities of climate adaptation in common-pool groundwater resources

  Journal of Public Economics · 2026-02-26

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The benefits of oak woodland restoration can exceed the costs of treating conifer encroachment

  California Agriculture · 2026-05-21

  articleOpen access

  Woody encroachment is a common threat in many fire-dependent ecosystems throughout the world. In northwestern California, conifer encroachment threatens the survival of deciduous oak woodlands and rangeland habitats, resulting in many negative impacts to flora and fauna biodiversity and livestock production. This study characterizes the benefits and costs of oak woodland restoration projects where Douglas fir is removed, weighing the timber value of the encroaching Douglas fir trees with the costs of removal and the value of post-restoration forage. Through a series of interviews and surveys, coupled with additional data collection and literature review, we found that the benefits of oak restoration through the removal of the Douglas fir encroachment exceeded the costs of treatment for landowners on average.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Can We Do Well, While Doing Good? A Comparison Between Sustainable and Conventional Investments

  Review of Development Economics · 2025-05-13 · 2 citations

  article1st author

  ABSTRACT This study investigates the role of financial, ethical, and environmental factors in shaping sustainable investment decisions, with a focus on green, social, and clean energy bonds. Using a combination of econometric models, such as the Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC‐GARCH) model, and machine learning techniques, including XGBoost and ElasticNet, we analyze the co‐movement between sustainable and conventional asset classes, macroeconomic variables, and policy uncertainty. Our results reveal that financial motivations, driven by risk–return considerations, play a dominant role in sustainable investment decisions, while ethical and environmental factors, although recognized, are secondary drivers. Additionally, structural break analysis highlights the impact of market shifts on time‐varying correlations between asset classes. Notably, we find that policy uncertainty (EPU) does not influence short‐term sustainable asset movements but is linked to the longer‐term trends in green bond issuance, as revealed by regression and machine learning models. Our analysis further suggests that increasing sustainable assets in a portfolio can enhance returns, though at the cost of increased risk. These findings emphasize the importance of financial incentives and stable market conditions in encouraging sustainable investment. Policy recommendations include reducing uncertainty in sustainable finance markets and offering targeted incentives to promote clean energy investment, particularly during periods of market instability.

  PublisherDOI

• The essential but often misunderstood role of economics in groundwater sustainability research

  Environmental Research Letters · 2025-06-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract To promote better groundwater policymaking, hydrologists and economists need to work together. The importance of hydrology is self-evident, but we posit that questions about the causes of and potential solutions for groundwater problems, and pathways to better policymaking, are fundamentally economics questions in that they rely on understanding people’s preferences, incentives, and responses to laws and other institutions that guide people’s actions. Not surprisingly then, most hydrologic research questions implicitly arise in response to economic demands and constraints. Hydrology and economics both rely on positive science involving theory, empirical methods, calibration, and validation. Indeed, their models can be linked to characterize and understand their interdependent dynamics. While other natural and social sciences also have important roles to play, this paper focuses primarily on how economics connects (ground)water to policymaking. Economics is a broad discipline with a primary role in understanding how people live in a landscape. Analogous to hydrology’s primary role in describing how water flows, recedes, seeps, evaporates, or recharges aquifers, economics describes people’s endeavors including their use of water, land, and other resources to produce, consume, trade, invest, conserve, and degrade the systems where they live. Policymaking is normative: it involves value judgments when assessing tradeoffs, setting priorities, or choosing among policy options. Economics is unique among disciplines in that it also comprises ‘normative analysis’ frameworks for measuring people’s values as a guide toward satisfying those preferences to the greatest extent possible (e.g. using benefit-cost analysis). But when natural science research is conducted without recognizing the economic considerations relevant to policymakers and managers, it may overlook critical ways that human system structures, dynamics, and people’s values inform the most promising ways to turn science into policy. By collaborating with economists, interdisciplinary research can bring natural sciences together with positive and normative economics to promote better groundwater policy.

  PublisherDOI

• Anticipatory effects of regulating the commons

  Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · 2025-05-24 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Navigating the Growing Prospects and Growing Pains of Managed Aquifer Recharge

  Ground Water · 2025-11-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Increasing water demands and declining groundwater levels have led to rising interest in managed aquifer recharge. That interest is growing in the United States-the focus of this article-and elsewhere. Increasing interest makes sense; managed aquifer recharge can reduce water-supply challenges and provide environmental benefits, sometimes with lower costs than alternative water-management approaches. But managed aquifer recharge also faces growing pains, which will make it difficult for projects to scale up and may limit the benefits provided by those projects that do go forward. Some of the problems arise from the challenges of finding physically suitable locations for managed aquifer recharge; many derive from economics, public policy, and law; and some derive from ways in which managed aquifer recharge could exacerbate traditional equity challenges of water management. But as we explain, there also are potential solutions to these challenges, and the future success of managed aquifer recharge will likely depend on the extent to which these solutions are adopted.

  PublisherDOI

• Anticipatory Effects of Regulation in Open Access

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Designing water markets for climate change adaptation

  Nature Climate Change · 2024-03-28 · 6 citations

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Replication Code for "The Dynamic Impacts of Pricing Groundwater"

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-11-28

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication files (including all scripts and publicly available data) for "The Dynamic Impacts of Pricing Groundwater" as published in JAERE.

  PublisherDOI

• Recharge net metering (ReNeM) is a novel, cost-effective management strategy to incentivize groundwater recharge

  Figshare · 2023-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  Code files and corresponding data tables capture the processes used to analyze the ReNeM program's economic implications.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Richard J. Sexton

  United States Naval Observatory

  27 shared

• Molly Bruce

  University of California, Berkeley

  12 shared

• Luke Sherman

  Global Policy Institute

  12 shared

• Michael Kiparsky

  12 shared

• A. T. Fisher

  University of Cincinnati

  11 shared

• Katrina Jessoe

  University of California, Davis

  8 shared

• W. Michael Hanemann

  3 shared

• Tina L. Saitone

  University of California, Davis

  1 shared