Donna Ramirez Harrington is an Associate Professor at UVM Economics Department. She comes to UVM from the University of Guelph where she was an Assistant Professor from 2004 until 2007. She finished her PhD from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 2004. She received her undergraduate degree in economics at the University of the Philippines in 1996.

Donna’s areas of scholarship are in the field of environmental economics and policy, environmental regulation, environmental technology adoption and innovation, corporate environmental strategy and environmental information disclosure.

Many of the environmental policies she investigates involve decentralized approaches to environmental protection that rely on voluntary adoption of environmental practices and disclosure of environmental information by regulated entities as a strategic response to pressures from regulators, consumers, investors, and the public. Examples include the adoption of pollution prevention activities, patented innovations, adoption of environmental management systems such as environmental auditing, and information disclosure mechanisms. Her research examines how well these approaches work relative to traditional forms of regulation and to what extent they can achieve environmental goals. Her work contributes to the improvement of the design of decentralized approaches as part of larger regulatory framework.