Overview

I am an Assistant Professor in environmental and agricultural economics at the University of Geneva, which I joined with a 2023 SNSF Starting Grant. My research focuses on policies to reduce tropical deforestation, with particular attention to supply chain interventions. I am currently investigating deforestation policies in the Amazon and in Indonesia, and the extent to which commitments made along agricultural supply chains translate into forest left standing. Before Geneva, I obtained my PhD from UC Davis, Agricultural and Resource Economics, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment and a Research Associate at the Environmental Policy Lab at ETH Zurich.

In previous work, I used satellite data to measure agricultural outcomes at scale, studying the dynamics of agricultural expansion and yield response across more than two million fields in the US. I also drew on satellite measures of harvests to design and evaluate index insurance, a promising but fragile instrument for agricultural risk management, in the US and in Kenya.

A second strand of my work addresses the econometric challenges these data raise. I have worked on adjusting satellite predictions for causal inference, on correcting prediction error bias in satellite based impact evaluation, and on developing a new asymptotic theory for the ultra high dimensionality encountered with these data.