Grasslands, especially when extensively managed and when replacing croplands, store greenhouse gases. As a result, Grassland Conservation Programs, that pay farmers for maintaining grassland cover, might be an effective way to combat climate change, if they succeed in triggering an increase in grassland cover for a reasonable amount of money.

Deforestation is a major contributor to the emission of greenhouse gases. Forest Conservation Programs that pay landowners for maintaining forest cover might thus be an effective way to fight climate change as long as the benefits from avoided emissions do not exceed the cost of triggering the conservation of additional forest cover.

A lot of environmental incentives are characterized by rules that transfer money to agents only if their supply of an environmental service is larger than a given threshold. Adapting recent results from the public finance literature, we show how to leverage notches to estimate the additionality of the policy and to derive its optimal second-best design. We apply these estimators to the French Grassland Conservation Program.

We exploit the Nitrate Directive setting allowing for a geographical variation in policy implementation to investigate the impacts of a command-and-control policy on non-point source pollution in France.

We exploit the spatially concentrated conversion to organic farming in France over the last twenty years to estimate its impact on water quality.

Land fragmentation is often believed to be detrimental to the efficiency of mechanized agriculture. Land consolidation programs aim at making mechanized agriculture more efficient.

We test whether social comparison nudges can promote water-saving behaviour among farmers.

We test whether nudges sent by mail can increase the subscription rate of PES and their spatial coordination.

We test whether the nudges can increase participation of winegrowers to a meeting on alternatives to pesticide use and the subsequent adoption of the technique.

The DEPHY network connected groups of farmers with a caseworker to help them achieve a significant reduction in pesticide use. We test whether they managed to do so.

We test whether nudges can trigger the adoption of alternative practices that emmit lower amounts of greenhouse gases.

Direct payments to farmers as part of the common agricultural policy now require minimu levels of crop diversification. We measure the effects of this eco-conditionnality.