Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. Bento graduated from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, with a B.A. in economics in 1996 and earned a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of Maryland in 2000. Prior to joining Cornell, he was a faculty member at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Sciences and Management and the Department of Economics at the University of California-Santa Barbara and, more recently, at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. He has also been a consultant to the research division of the World Bank. Most of Professor Bento’s research lies at the boundaries of environmental, energy, urban, and public economics, and uses state-of-the-art econometric and computable general equilibrium methods, as well as geographical information (GIS) tools.