Publications of the Chair

Disentangling what Drives Global Urea Price: Short-Run and Long-Run Effects

2026
Authors :
Emma Skalski, Marilyne Huchet, Marie-Hélène Hubert

The concurrent surge in fuel, food, and fertilizer prices underscores the broad vulnerability of agrifood system in an interconnected global economy, where supply chain disruptions can propagate rapidly. It also highlights the urgent need for a deeper understanding of the short-and long-term drivers of the price of the world's most widely used nitrogen fertilizer:...

Subsidising Electric Cooking to Protect the Environment: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in the D.R. Congo

2025
Authors :
Sébastien Desbureaux, Lara Collart, Nik Stoop, Raphael Soubeyran, Marijke Verpoorten, Mathieu Couttenier, Christine Cikesa, Jean de la Croix Kembere Mulwahili,Natsuno Shinagawa

This randomized controlled trial investigates how to accelerate the transition to the cleanest cooking fuel, electricity, and quantifies the benefits for people and the environment. 

Historical Carbon Debts and Credits – 1750-2023

2025
Authors :
Tobias Angel, Alain Naef

Historical contributions of carbon emissions differ widely between nations, constraining climate change negotiations. Cumulative country estimates ignore historical populations, overstating the role of large-population countries. In this paper, we present a global accounting framework. Adding CO2 emissions from land use change radically reshapes the map, moving Brazil from the world’s 8th largest creditor to...

The Environmental Consequences of Economic Inequalities: A Systematic Empirical Literature Review

2025
Authors :
Luc Elie, Tobias Angel, Alexandre Berthe

Greater economic inequalities increase environmental degradation in most cases. Building on evidence from 136 studies and 406 empirical tests between 1998 and 2022, we construct a database enabling an in-depth analysis of the literature. Our main findings are threefold. 

Climate-Conscious Bank Customers

2025
Authors :
Jean-Stéphane Mésonnier and Clément Mazet-Sonhilac

We exploit new data on NGO campaigns that target banks financing fossil fuels ("brown'' banks) to build a measure of French banks' environmental reputation, which we merge with granular data on bank deposits and loans of households in France over 2010-2020. We find that banks receive relatively fewer household deposits when they are perceived...

Land Sparing and Land Sharing in a Heterogeneous Landscape

2026
Authors :
Guy Meunier

Through this paper, Guy Meunier characterizes how biodiversity concerns reshape the efficient allocation of land exploitation as a function of damage curvature and food-demand elasticity. Overall, the analysis highlights the role of indirect production reallocation and market-mediated feedbacks in biodiversity-oriented agricultural policy.

The deforestation effect of climate aid

2025
Authors :
Bertille Daran, Clément Nedoncelle

This study examines the impact of climate aid on deforestation in Africa from 2001 to 2021, using a novel dataset of geocoded aid projects. The effects are heterogeneous and vary by initial forest cover: aid increases deforestation in densely forested areas, while it appears to reduce deforestation where forest cover was initially sparse. 

The Cultural Roots of Deforestation in Africa

2025
Authors :
Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Raphael Soubeyran,

We study the relationship between culture and environmental conservation through the lens of deforestation. Focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 2001-2021, we show that changes of national leaders affect deforestation in a way that depends on the environmental culture of their ethnic group’s. Our results suggest that culture is an important lever for environmental conservation...

Stranded Assets and Central Banks: from Lenders of Last Resort to ‘Green’ Balance Sheet Policies in Support of Decarbonization

2025
Authors :
Jézabel Couppey-Soubeyran, Emmanuel Carré

This article  analyses the role that central banks could play in dealing with stranded "brown"assets as a result of the ecological transition.The estimates provided thtough a database that we are building for the analyses suggest that central banks, as "liquidators of last resort" of stranded asset markets, would inject volumes of liquidity comparable to...

Imperfect Competition and the Adoption of Clean Technology: The Case of CCS in Cement

2025
Authors :
Quentin Hoarau, Jean-Pierre Ponssard

his paper studies the adoption of clean technology in an oligopolistic setting, focusing on carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the cement sector. Firms can choose between two technologies: a carbon-
intensive ("dirty") technology and a low-carbon ("clean") one.