Jennifer Alix-Garcia
Jennifer Alix-Garcia
Professor of Applied Economics
Professor of Applied Economics
I am an applied microeconomist. My research focuses on environment and development, economic geography, and the impacts of forced migration.
I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. I have worked at the University of Montana, the University of San Francisco, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am now Professor of Applied Economics and the Hector Macpherson Endowed Professor of Land Economics at Oregon State University.
Here is my current CV.
This is my ResearchGate profile.
Here is my google scholar page.
My ORCID is 0000-0003-0200-0496.049
If you are interested in replication packages for some of my papers, you can find them on this Dataverse.
“Tradeoffs and synergies for agriculture and environmental outcomes in the tropics”, with Juliano Assunção, Teevrat Garg, Prakash Mishra, and Fanny Moffette. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Forthcoming 2026: https://doi.org/10.1086/742011
Summary: A synthesis of the evidence on how farming and the environment interact across the tropics, cataloging policies that highlight where food production and environmental quality can be made to work together.
“The unintended consequences of production bans: the case of the 2018 Kenya logging moratorium” with Anne Bartlett, Alejandro Abarca, Sarah Walker, Jamon Van Den Hoek, Paulo Murillo-Sandoval, and Hannah K Friedrich Environmental Research Letters, 2024: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad661c
Summary: Production bans do not always do what is intended. Kenya's 2018 logging ban displaced wood extraction rather than reducing it, driving domestic charcoal prices up about 36% and charcoal imports from neighboring Uganda up 133% within the first six months.
“Emerging design principles for environmental, economic, and equity successes in land conservation” with Katharine Sims. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences vol. 123, Issue 2, 2026: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2421731122 .
Summary: Drawing on a synthesis of more than 200 studies, this paper proposes eight design principles for conservation programs that can succeed simultaneously on environmental, economic, and equity goals.
“Land Tenure Security and Deforestation: Experimental Evidence from Uganda” with Sarah Walker, Anne Bartlett, and Alice Calder. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 131, 2025: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2025.103137 .
Summary: In a field experiment with Ugandan forest users, insecure land tenure raised tree extraction by 23%, while the option to secure tenure through certification cut that effect in half, showing that strengthening property rights can meaningfully reduce deforestation.
“Scaling up forest conservation on private land: Causal evidence from Brazil” with Roberto Toto, Katharine Sims, Bruno Coutinho, Carlos Muñoz Brenes, Ludmila Pugliese, and Alex Mendes. Nature Communications 16.4715, 2025: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-59194-3
Summary: Brazil's Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact increased restored forest cover on supported private land by 10–20 percentage points, with the largest gains in more remote areas and in states with stronger environmental enforcement, demonstrating that large-scale restoration on private land is achievable when the economic and institutional conditions line up.
"Agricultural Subsidies: Cutting into Forest Conservation?" with Fanny Moffette. Environment and Development Economics, 29:3, June 2024 , pp. 179 - 205: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355770X23000189
Summary: Mexico's per-head livestock subsidy increased municipal deforestation by about 7%, though the effect was smaller where payments for ecosystem services were more common, suggesting that agricultural subsidies can quietly undercut conservation programs and would do less damage if better targeted.