Research

Publications:

Noack, F., Engist, D., Gantois, J., Gaur, V., Hyjazie, B. F., Larsen, A. E., M'Gonigle, L. K., Missirian, A., Qaim, M., Sargent, R. D., Souza-Rodrigues, E., & Kremen, C. (2024). Environmental impacts of genetically modified organisms. Science, 385(6712), eado9340.

Huebner, G. M., Chabé-Ferret, S., Missirian, A., Wang, S., Lopez-Feldman, A., Sogari, G., Wang, Z., Li, H., Zhang, B., Wang, B., Mediratta, S., & Ivanova, D. (2023). Effectively and equitably steering pro-environmental behavior. One Earth, 6(4), 329-332. 

Naeem, S., Bruner, S. G., & Missirian, A. (2021). Environmental risk in an age of biotic impoverishment. Current Biology, 31(19), R1164–R1169.

Missirian, A., Frank, E. G., Gersony, J. T., Wong, J. C. Y., & Naeem, S. (2019). Biodiversity and Thermal Ecological Function: The Influence of Freshwater Algal Diversity on Local Thermal Environments. Ecology and Evolution, 9(12), 6741–7373. 

Missirian, A., & Schlenker, W. (2017). Asylum applications respond to temperature fluctuations. Science, 358(6370), 1610–1614.  >>  Media coverage

Missirian, A., & Schlenker, W. (2017). Asylum Applications and Migration Flows. American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, 107(5), 436–440. 

Working papers

Can Demand-Side Interventions Rebuild Global Fisheries? (with Christopher Costello, Olivier Deschênes, Michael Melnychuk, Gavin McDonald — new version coming soon) Despite recent improvements in the status of wild-capture fisheries in large part attributable to management, a growing share (33 %) of stocks remains overexploited. Demand-side interventions have been touted as a blanket solution that would, through price signals, set the fishing pressure right. That reasoning hinges in part on a sufficient level of responsiveness embodied in the supply elasticity of fisheries. Using plausibly exogenous variation in fish prices and extensive data on the world's fisheries, we first estimate this elasticity, and find it is very low -- about a tenth of that observed in comparable sectors. Demand-side policies also assume that the resulting fishing effort will be sufficient to ensure the recovery of depleted fisheries. We quantitatively verify whether that is the case, by combining a bioeconomic model of fisheries with a model of global seafood supply and demand calibrated with our estimates. We find that no matter how drastic the intervention, demand-side policies never achieve more than marginal improvements to fisheries status compared to a counterfactual no-intervention scenario, and at enormous costs. On the other hand, supply-side policies (e.g., quotas), even imperfectly designed or implemented, result in substantial recovery. We conclude that in general, the conditions for demand-side policies to succeed are not met, but might be for some specific fisheries or should factors affecting supply elasticity such as subsidies change.

Yes, in Your Backyard: Forced Technological Adoption and Spatial Externalities. I study a phenomenon of hastened technology adoption facilitated by a negative spatial externality. GMO seeds have been engineered to withstand the application of particular weedkillers: farmers can use them in-crop, killing the weeds, leaving the crop unscathed.  I show that the adoption of such seeds generates negative externalities on downwind neighbors, increasing the probability of the adoption of the same seed by 29% as well as a conversion of cropland to different crops able to withstand the weedkiller.  Overall yields remained unchanged as the benefits of the weedkiller on yields are offset by the negative effects of crop failures for neighbors. Consequences of such rapid adoption include possible monopolization on the seed market. [TSE working paper]

Local Benefits of Apex Predators: Evidence from a River Discontinuity (with Eyal G. Frank, Dominic P. Parker, Jennifer L. Raynor) What are the long-term equilibrium impacts of removing apex predators from the environment? We examine how the presence of wolves north, but not south, of the Saint Lawrence River in Canada affects the share of animal-related vehicle collisions. We find evidence that wolves reduce the share of animal-related vehicle collisions by 38.5%—reflecting averted losses valued at 30.7 million 2023 USD. This finding demonstrates that in a setting in which both driver and animal behaviors can be assumed to be in equilibrium, the presence of an apex predator has meaningful benefits to the safety and property of people.

The Value of Disaster Prevention: The Desert Locust (with Joséphine Gantois,  Evelina Linnros, Anna Tompsett, Amir Jina, Gordon McCord, Eyal G. Frank) Monitoring systems for diseases and pests are active in most countries, detecting early signs of potentially disastrous outbreaks in time for preventative action. These monitoring systems are costly, however, and identifying their economic value requires estimating damages from outbreaks in empirical settings where monitoring is neither uniform nor exogenous. We estimate the value of monitoring systems for the desert locust—known to devour entire agricultural fields—and their impact on human well-being. Our analysis uses data from 1985 to 2020 across Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, including locust monitoring records and data from the Demographic and Health Surveys. We leverage conflict and weather events in locust breeding areas to detect the effects of monitoring interruptions on locust swarm outbreaks. We then reconstruct the spatial patterns of locust migrations to propagate these effects on locust swarm outbreaks beyond breeding areas. Finally, we show that in-utero exposure to a locust swarm reduces height-for-age by 0.36 standard deviations and increases the probability of stunting by 7 percentage points (a 16% increase). Taken together, these estimates allow us to quantify the effects of a change in monitoring effort on subsequent locust swarms and on human health. We calculate that in the absence of effective locust monitoring, an additional 238 thousand children per birth cohort in the affected countries would experience stunting, creating economic losses of US$11.9 billion per year. This implies a benefit-cost ratio of over 300 for locust monitoring budgets.

The Impact of Organic Farming on Productivity and Biodiversity: Evidence from a Natural Experiment (with Sylvain Chabé-Ferret, Marine Coinon, François Libois, Marta Pinzan, Arnaud Reynaud, Clélia Sirami, David Sheeren, Eva Tène) Organic farming, which eschews the use of synthetic inputs, has been proposed as a viable alternative to feed the world without degrading the environment. Despite the growing importance of organic farming, there is to date no large-scale credible evidence on whether organic farming achieves this feat. In this paper, we provide the first large-scale estimates of the causal impact of organic farming on biodiversity and on yields using the large increase in areas under organic farming that happened in France after 2000 as a result of a massive increase in subsidies. Leveraging a rich dataset containing more that 400,000 observations on water quality, 500,000 observations on bird abundance and 160,000 observations of farmers’ practices, we find that yields decrease by 33% after conversion to organic farming, while bird abundance increases by 20%. We also find that organic farming decreases nitrate concentrations in rivers by 8%, but does not decrease phosphorus concentrations nor eutrophication and does not increase fish biodiversity. We interpret this result as suggesting that phosphorus is the limiting factor of eutrophication in French rivers.

Are Forest Conservation Programs a Cost-Effective Way to Fight Climate Change? A Meta-Analysis (with Sylvain Chabé-Ferret, Philippe Delacote, Anca Voia) Deforestation, especially in the tropics, is bad news. It contributes to climate change, but also to the degradation of biodiversity and the decrease in the quality and availability of water resources. Payments for forest conservation, which compensate landowners for the preservation of forest cover, have been proposed as a way to curb deforestation. Very conflicting results exist in the literature for the effectiveness of these programs, with some estimates suggesting very large impacts and high benefit cost-ratios, while other papers suggest disappointing results. Which parameters are critical for computing the climate benefits of Payments for Forest Conservation Programs is also still unclear. We show that three key parameters are crucial for computing the climate benefits of Payments for Forest Conservation: additionality, permanence and leakage. We run an extensive meta-analysis of the literature looking for estimates of these three parameters. We show that one key covariate reconciles the conflicting estimates of the additionality of Payments for Forest Conservation: baseline deforestation rates. The additionality of Payments for Forest Conservation is higher where deforestation pressure is large, and is lower where deforestation pressure is low. We also find evidence in favor of some permanence of effects and no evidence of leakage effects. Introducing our estimates into a benefit-cost analysis, we find that the climate benefits of forest conservation programs are higher than their costs when deforestation pressure is moderate to large. 

Reversing Local Extinctions: The Economic Impacts of Reintroducing Wolves in North America (with Levi Altringer, Eyal G. Frank, Dominic P. Parker, Jennifer L. Raynor) In an attempt to reverse previous local extinction events, several countries have designed programs to reintroduce species, from butterflies to large predators. We evaluate the economic impacts from the reintroduction of wolves, and analyze both the direct effects on livestock and the indirect effects of wolves through their interactions with non-livestock species such as coyotes and deer. We use data on livestock losses, farm income, and vehicle collisions to examine the benefits and costs of reintroducing wolves through their direct and indirect species interactions. Our analysis relies on the quasi-experimental variation from the timing of reintroduction programs that vary by state, and the migration of wolves across administrative borders. We find that wolf recovery does not decrease livestock revenue, productivity, or total losses. Rather, we find that wolf recovery leads to a sharp decrease in predation losses for calves, likely by killing or driving out coyotes. For crops, we find that wolf recovery has no effect on total crop revenue or crop insurance payments, which suggests wolves have little effect on damage caused by deer and other cervids. We find that all-cause vehicle collision rates decline following the reintroduction of wolves, driven mostly by animal-related collisions, but those are strictly concentrated in one out of six states. Our findings make it clear that focusing only on the most obvious direct damages from wolves—as policy debates often do—would yield a miscalculation of net economic losses or benefits, and that spatial heterogeneity is large both for the damages and benefits. This has implications for current and planned wolf reintroduction programs, as well as reintroduction programs for other predator species across the world.

Payment for Ecosystem Services and the Preservation of Forest Cover in Ecuador. Policies for habitat preservation are increasingly favoring contractual schemes whereby conservation actions undertaken by private individuals are voluntary but incentivized by payments. This is where their appeal lies, as opposed schemes relying on restriction of use or exclusion. It is also their weakness, but whether that's a fatal one is still an open debate. The present study analyzes such a scheme in Ecuador, and shows that not only enrolment was biased towards marginal land that was at a lower risk of deforestation anyway, but also that compliance fell short. As a result, deforestation dynamics were not altered by the program. This implies that targeting and enforcement should be a priority when considering designing a payment for ecosystem service scheme. 

What drives migratory pressure at the southern EU borders? In the wake of the "migration crisis" of 2015 in the Mediterranean region, environmental factors (e.g. droughts) have re-emerged as a possible major driver of emigration.  Systematically proving and quantifying their implication, however, has remained arduous, mostly for want of quality data on international migration with a global coverage of origin countries.  Here I propose the use of a novel data set for the study of migration drivers that hasn't, to my knowledge, been used for that purpose. They are correlated with another measure of distress-driven migration, applications for asylum (into the European Union), and respond in the expected direction to known drivers of migration (e.g. income at origin). Finally, weather shocks seem to influence this measure of distress-driven, but the picture is somewhat less clear here, likely due to the shortness of the panel of weather and migration data at hand. [CEEP working paper]

Work in progress

Agricultural landscape complexity and pest pressure: A Less Simplistic Approach to Landscape Complexity. With Eyal G. Frank.

When Do Incentives for Preemptive Action Erode Gains from Policy? Studying the Effectiveness of the Endangered Species Act. With Eyal G. Frank, Sushant Banjara.

The Effect of Farm structure on Economic and Environmental Outcomes. With Joakim A. Weil, Emmanuel Paroissien, Sylvain Chabé-Ferret.