[DENVER] Four faculty members in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at Ohio State were recognized during an annual professional conference. The Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA) annual meeting was held July 27 – 29, 2025, in Denver, Colorado.
Dr. Amy Ando, Department Chair and Professor, was inducted as an AAEA Fellow. Recognition as an AAEA Fellow is AAEA's most prestigious honor, recognizing those who provide continuous contribution to the advancement of agricultural or applied economics.
Dr. Ando’s research focuses on the economics of nature conservation and ecosystem-service values. This work helps inform cost-effective conservation planning, improves the performance of agricultural and urban environmental policies, reduces the uncertainty in conservation outcomes from climate change, and helps policy makers know what values we gain from environmental stewardship. She has also served on the AAEA Board of Directors (2021-2024) and as an editor of the association’s flagship journal, American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
Dr. Sathya Gopalakrishnan, Professor, received the 2025 AAEA Presidential Recognition Award for her work as chair of the Association’s Access Taskforce. Dr. Gopalakrishnan and taskforce colleagues have worked over the past two years to identify concerns that limit members of the AAEA from fully participating in the professional association, including the AAEA Annual Meeting, and to develop recommendations to increase member engagement in professional activities and initiatives. They shared their findings and recommendations with Association Leadership at the meeting.
Dr. Alex Hollingsworth, Associate Professor and AEDE Honors Coordinator, was presented with the Quality of Research Discovery Award for his research paper, The Gift of a Lifetime: The Hospital, Modern Medicine, and Mortality. The Quality of Research Discovery Award is granted to encourage excellent publications that demonstrate excellence and creativity in research methodology and/or expand the frontiers of applied economics.
Dr. Hollingsworth, with a joint appointment in AEDE and the Department of Economics, focuses his research on health and environmental topics. In this award-winning paper, Dr. Hollingsworth and his co-authors examine how access to modern hospitals and medicine affects mortality by leveraging efforts of the Duke Endowment to modernize hospitals in the early twentieth century. They show that the Duke Endowment’s investment in expanding hospitals and obtaining state-of-the-art medical technology increased the size and quality of the medical sector, fostering growth in not-for-profit hospitals and high-quality physicians. Duke funding reduced both infant mortality — with larger effects for Black infants than White infants—and long-run mortality.
Dr. Ani Katchova, Professor and Farm Income Enhancement Chair, received the Agricultural Finance and Management Section Publication of Lasting Impact Award. The award recognized her article, The effects of direct payments on liquidity and repayment capacity of beginning farmers, co-authored by Jaclyn Kropp, University of Florida, and published in Agricultural Finance Review in 2011. The article studied the challenges of accessing credit for beginning farmers and how direct government payments did not significantly contribute to the repayment capacity of beginning farmers. The impact of this research was to show a mechanism by which decoupled payments had a potential to distort agricultural production.
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The Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA) is a not-for-profit association serving the professional interests of members working in agricultural and broadly related fields of applied economics.