Research Seminars at ILR

Jacob Moscona | (MIT)

June, 25th 2025 | 4pm CEST

Online

Inappropriate Technology: Evidence from Global Agriculture

An influential explanation for global productivity differences is that frontier technologies are adapted to the high-income countries that develop them and "inappropriate'' elsewhere. We study this hypothesis in agriculture using data on novel plant varieties, patents, output, and the global range of crop pests and pathogens. Innovation focuses on the environmental conditions of technology leaders, and ecological mismatch with these markets reduces technology transfer and production. Combined with a model, our estimates imply that inappropriate technology explains 15-20% of cross-country agricultural productivity differences and re-shapes the potential consequences of innovation policy, the rise of new technology leaders, and environmental change.

Mengyu Liang  | (Stanford)

June, 6th 2025  | 5 PM CEST

Online

Long-term commitment critical to reach forest restoration’s climate mitigation potential in East Africa

Forest restoration is gaining momentum as a natural climate solution to facilitate carbon dioxide removal while also addressing the biodiversity crisis. Globally, three primary restoration strategies—natural regeneration, assisted natural regeneration, and active restoration—have been adopted. However, inconsistent monitoring of forest dynamics means large uncertainties remain over their long-term potential to enhance carbon (C) removal. We examined over 30 years of forest aboveground carbon (AGC) estimates from high-resolution lidar, Landsat imagery, and field data across East Africa. Our study shows that assisted natural regeneration and active restoration outperform natural regeneration in enhancing forest C removal capacity, with long-term implementation (over 9 years) needed to overcome the initial lags in AGC accumulation. Restoring 14.24 million hectares of suitable areas available in East Africa, representing 2.1% of suitable restoration areas globally, could enhance forest C removal by 2.85 ± 0.82 gigatons of C (Gt C) by 2050. However, less than one quarter of this potential would be achieved by 2030.

Ashley Larsen | (UC Santa Barbara)

Spillover effects of organic agriculture on pesticide use on nearby fields

Organic agriculture is often suggested as a means to improve agricultural sustainability through less intensive and more natural production methods. Yet, the environmental impacts of organic product ion practices are only partially understood and whether such production practices have spillover impacts, beneficial or not, for surrounding producers remains unknown. Using a rich, field-level database of crop production and pesticide use from an intensive and diverse growing region in California, we seek to identify how surrounding organic cropland influences pest burden, proxied with field-level pesticide use, for both organic and conventional producers. We find surrounding organic agriculture leads to a small increase in pesticide use on conventional fields and a larger decrease on organic fields. This effect is effects primarily driven by insecticides, which is what we would anticipate based on prior ecological studies. Due to the different effects on conventional and organic focal fields, our simulation suggests that at low levels of organic agriculture in the landscape, levels commonly observed today, there is a net increase in pesticide use, which can be mitigated by spatial ly clustering organic cropland. 

Céline Bonnet | (Toulouse School of Economics)

Can the economic and environmental impacts of policies targeting animal-based product consumption be reconciled? A value chain approach.

Given the significant environmental impacts associated with animal-based food consumption, this paper compares the effects of various policy instruments targeting consumers to reduce those environmental externalities. We evaluate price-based instruments-specifically, excise taxes linked to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the removal of reduced value-added tax (VAT) rates-and contrast their environmental mitigation potential with policies that aim to change preferences for animal-based products.

In order to take into account the structure of the food supply chain and firms' price strategic decisions in the effectiveness of the policy instruments, we employ a structural econometric model of value chains. This model explicitly incorporates the market structures of food processing and retailing, as well as the interactions between these two stages. Using Kantar WorldPanel data on household-level purchases of branded animal-based products we first estimate consumption substitution patterns through a flexible random utility approach. We then estimate manufacturers and retailers' gross margins using a Nash Bargaining model of vertical relationships. We show that the disaggregation of animal products leads to higher elasticity estimates and that retailer margins are greater than manufacturer margins in most cases. 

Those estimation results serve as a benchmark to simulate a range of policy scenarios -excise taxes, standard VAT rates, and preference-shifting interventions-targeting various categories of animal products, including beef, red meat, and all animal products. We show that tax instruments are overpassed on to consumers, thereby amplifying their environmental impact. Across all scenarios, food consumption's environmental footprint is reduced; however, these gains come at the cost of consumer welfare and profit reductions for both manufacturers and especially retailers. Nonetheless, in scenarios involving excise taxes or a VAT increase limited to red meat, the environmental benefits can outweigh the associated economic losses, suggesting that such targeted fiscal policies can be both effective and welfare-enhancing from a societal perspective.

David Schäfer | (Eurocare)

Challenges in implementing pesticide use in large-scale economic models for policy assessment

The reduction of pesticide use and their associated risks in agriculture is among the core goals of the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategy for 2030 and is also well embedded in the current reform of the CAP. A comprehensive economic and environmental policy impact assessment at European Union (EU) scale is still pending due to hurdles such as the representation of the large number of approved pesticides available to farmers. The aim of this seminar is to demonstrate current implementation developments of pesticide use and associated technology options for pesticide reduction in large-scale economic models with the example of the partial-equilibrium model CAPRI.

Jonas Schmitt | (ETH Zürich)

The role of on-farm crop diversification and its synergies with agricultural insurance to cope with extreme weather events in German agriculture.

Most existing weather risk assessments do not consider and compare the impact of multiple extreme weather events on yields of different crops at farm level. However, this is critical for farmers’ on-farm and off-farm risk management decisions and prioritization. Moreover, not all risk management strategies are effective or available for different severity level of damage events and farmers often need to combine different strategies to achieve an adequate risk reduction. For example, on-farm crop diversification may be sufficient for moderate, but not for extreme weather anomalies, and insurance options are often too expensive when designed to cover systemic risks such as drought. Therefore, this presentation aims to address the overarching question of how on-farm crop diversification and insurance can be combined to effectively exploit their synergies to improve cash crop risk management for different severity levels of weather anomalies.