Research
Publications:
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) 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]
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.
Reversing Local Extinctions: The Economic Impacts of Reintroducing Wolves in North America. With Eyal G. Frank, Dominic P. Parker, Jennifer L. Raynor.
Are Forest Conservation Programs a Cost-Effective Way to Fight Climate Change? A Meta-Analysis. With Sylvain Chabé-Ferret, Philippe Delacote, Anca Voia.
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, Clelia Sirami, David Sheeren, Eva Tène.