Bio:  Fatima Lambarraa-Lehnhardt is a research economist at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research in Germany. With over 20 years of experience in research and teaching, her work focuses on production and behavioral economics to analyze decision-making processes. Her recent research interests center on the trade-off between resilience and productivity and its impact on sustainability. She focuses on methods such as stochastic frontier modeling, total factor productivity decomposition, real options analysis, choice modeling for decision analysis, and experimental economics methods. 

Title of the talk: Balancing Resilience, Productivity, and Efficiency: An In-Depth Analysis of Mediterranean Agriculture 

Summary: Climate change poses a significant threat to agricultural production in the Mediterranean region, making it essential to build resilient and efficient farming systems to ensure food security and sustainable Mediterranean agriculture. Improved farm resilience to climate shocks can enhance farm efficiency, though the impact varies depending on the sustainability of the farming system in question. This study aims to analyze resilience and farm efficiency using potential resilience capacities and a stochastic frontier approach, with a focus on how these trade-offs depend on the sustainability of the farming system. Additionally, we investigate the dynamics between potential and revealed resilience capacities using Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth. The results indicate that the trade-offs between resilience and farm efficiency are closely tied to the sustainability of the farming system. Furthermore, TFP growth is notably influenced by adaptability, suggesting that balancing farm performance and resilience is crucial for achieving sustainable Mediterranean agriculture.

Bio: Ibrahim Tahri is a research scholar in the IIASA Economic Frontiers Program, which he joined in 2024. His work centers on economic modeling, contributing to two major research projects: MultiFutures and JUSTCOAL. Before joining IIASA, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in the FutureLab on Public Economics and Climate Finance (PECF), where he played a role in significant initiatives such as the FinFail Project.

His research interests span financial economics, macroeconomics, and climate finance, with a particular focus on financing the green transition. His work has been published in multiple journals including the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM), Annals of Operations Research (ANOR), Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (JEBO), and Economic Modeling.

Tahri holds a PhD in Economics from The New School for Social Research in New York, USA, where he was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. He also earned a master’s degree in public management from Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, and a bachelor’s degree in international studies from Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. 

Title of the talk: Information Cost and Sustainable Investment

Summary: To describe underinvestment in green assets, we employ a combined learning-investment model to rationalize portfolio under diversification. Building upon the literature of investment under incomplete information, we derive a Merton-type stochastic continuous-time learning-investment model, where investors choose both the optimal degree of attention to information (at a given cost) and optimal portfolio weights. High information costs reduce the investor’s ability to learn about the asset’s fundamentals, which would enable her to reduce the uncertainty about the expected mean-return. Therefore, when there is a high level of uncertainty and information costs are high, investors tend to favor familiar assets. In the context of a multi-asset portfolio, with two risky assets, if the two assets are positively correlated the investor invest more in the asset with lower information cost, the effect is less pronounced when the risky assets are negatively correlated.