Andres Mendez Ruiz

Andres Mendez is an applied scientist with Uber. He received his PhD in economics student at the University of Texas at Austin. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, while his parents were studying at the Goethe University, but moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, when he was only four years old, where he grew up. Prior to his latest educational endeavor in the Lone Star State, he completed a Master of Science in Economics at El Colegio de Mexico, in Mexico City, and a Master of Science in Econometrics at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He decided to cross the pond for one year, before crossing the Rio Grande, to sharpen his skills in econometrics because during his bachelor’s he studied philosophy and wanted to be better prepared for the upcoming duels against confounders and other foes of statistical inference he would inevitably face in a PhD program. When he is not reading economics papers or working on his own projects, Andres likes swimming at the outdoor pool of UT’s Gregory Gymnasium, and every now and again he enjoys  attending  live music concerts in one of the several venues available in Austin. In his ongoing research project, Andres is investigating how private contracting frictions could be causing underinvestment in natural gas capturing infrastructure and the effects of the flaring regulations, released in 2014 by the North Dakota Industrial Commission, as a potential mechanism to coordinate upstream firms’ investments in  gas gathering pipelines in the Bakken.