Welcome!
I am an environmental economist specialising in the macroeconomics of food production, trade, and land use. In my research, I mainly use theory-driven general equilibrium and structural trade models to quantify the long-term effects of policies and other interventions on the economy.
My dissertation mainly focused on global meat production and consumption, concerning two themes: first, how a single region with a high willingness to pay for environmental quality could use trade policies strategically to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from global beef production, and second, the impacts of declining meat consumption preferences in the wealthier parts of the world on cropland use, food provision, and welfare.
More about my current research
My doctoral project, supervised by Professor Rob Hart, consists of three papers:
In my Job Market Paper, we provide theoretical and quantitative evidence on the concept of Environmental Comparative Advantage. We show that if a region is more willing to pay for global emissions reductions than its trading partner, and has intrinsically cleaner production of a pollution-intensive good, there may be a case for subsidising that good to crowd out even more pollution-intensive production abroad. We evaluate the role of such ‘strategic’ environmental policies using a novel Ricardian EU–South America trade model, in which beef is the dirtiest good. The quantitative results show that when the regulator is allowed to set export rebates to EU beef exporters higher than the social cost of carbon, relatively dirtier South American beef production is crowded out, leading to net emission cuts and welfare gains. Meanwhile, pure production subsidies to EU beef producers have negligible effects. The paper demonstrates that environmentally motivated production subsidies in emission-intensive industries are generally ineffective in reducing global emissions, while implementing strategic export rebates could improve second-best allocations.
In the second paper, I apply a modern quantitative trade model, calibrated to food and feed crop production in the ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global North’. I use the calibrated model to explore the impacts of reduced meat preferences in wealthier regions on the share of cropland devoted to feed versus food crops, consumption, production, trade flows, and regional welfare.
In the third paper, we apply index decomposition methods, adapted to the agricultural sector, to decompose nitrogen and phosphorus leakage trends from Swedish arable land.
In addition to my thesis work, I am also part of the research project WaterPlan, which aims to enable well-informed analyses and prioritised measures for protecting drinking water sources as part of future urban development.