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Assistant professor at TSE, Anouch Missirian is an environmental economist. Her research focuses on topics at the interplay between ecological and economic processes. Prior to moving to Toulouse, she received her PhD from Columbia University and worked as a postdoctoral fellow for a year at UC Santa Barbara.
You studied biology and ecology at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. How did this influence your subsequent career as an economist?
Paradoxically, these are the years that turned me into an economist. They made me realize that many objects that ecologists study are embedded in social systems, and that what really interested me was the interplay between ecological dynamics and economic forces. Today, that background directly influences the topics I research as an environmental economist, the way I go about finding natural experiments as an empiricist, and enables me to collaborate fluidly with ecologists.
You have been studying the impact of climate change on human migration for several years now. What are your main research findings?
The starting point for that line of research – in the midst of the so-called migration crisis of 2014/15 – was the question: what will the effect of climate change on human migrations be? We suspected that temperature variations could affect crop yields and thus farmers’ livelihoods, and directly or indirectly lead to international migration. We also reasoned that the type of migration induced wouldn’t be the happy, long-planned move to a place of choice, but might be better reflected in asylum-seeker flows, or similar measures of distress migration. Both observations guided our empirical approach. We find that applications for asylum into the EU increase when temperatures in the origin countries deviate from the moderate optimum (about 20°C, calculated over the growing area and season): that is, when areas that are important for crops are warmer or colder than the ideal temperature for crop yields during the times that are important to crops. We interpret our findings as evidence for an “agricultural channel” linking environmental change and migration. This is important conceptually but also to better anticipate the effects of climate change (e.g. via adaptation policies). More work to unpack the mechanisms and consequences both at origin and destination is in progress.
Sustainable fishing was a key topic at the One Ocean Summit last month. Can you tell us about your other work on global fisheries?
Policy tools aimed at ensuring that halieutic resources are used sustainably have been around for a while, and are the subject of a rich literature. Among those that work very well are catch shares, whereby a cap on the total quantity caught of a certain fish is set every year by the fishery manager based on how the stock is faring, then divided among fishers; in some cases those shares or quotas are tradable. But having a fishery manager isn’t always possible; for example, because of institutional capacity or poorly defined property rights. A case in point is the high seas, where no country has jurisdiction and anyone can fish. Hence the increasingly popular idea of tackling consumer demand for seafood instead, and that is the starting point of my current work with colleagues at UC Santa Barbara. Specifically, we ask what amount of demand change would be needed to get a meaningful change in catches. Empirically, we calculate the supply elasticity for wild-caught fish and find it is very low. In addition to bioeconomic simulations using that parameter, this indicates that even large demand shrinkages are unlikely, on their own, to lead to large enough reductions in fishing pressure. While well-intentioned, those “demand-side interventions” are thus unlikely to deliver, due to the weak responsiveness of fishers to prices.
You teach environmental economics, and ecosystem management and policy at TSE. What do you hope your students will take away from these courses?
My aim is to tool up the students with whatever they need to be autonomous in their future work in environmental economics, as researchers, practitioners, analysts, or policymakers. Both courses equip the students with topical knowledge – including what we know about cap-and-trade programs, or the effectiveness of the main fishery management tools – and transferable skills. Among those skills are critical thinking, in particular as the students engage with academic research, both as consumers and producers (especially in the first course) and with a palette of policy options, none of which is a silver bullet. The first course outlines the contour of the (mostly empirical) research frontier in environmental economics. The second course brings together modern insights from ecology and environmental economics (models, empirical studies) and adds a strong emphasis on programming, applied to problems of ecosystem management. The students manipulate data and models to obtain insights, which offers multiplicious benefits: having taken the class, they can handle data in a reliable, reproducible way, and produce useful summaries (visual and otherwise); the data wrangling exercises teach them to exert caution in interpreting data, including various potential pitfalls; and learning a programming language (R) fosters a type of logical, sequential thinking when problem-solving.
How would you describe Toulouse and the work environment at TSE?
Toulouse is outstanding! History-dense, perfectly sized, absolutely beautiful. So far I’ve only had good experiences with Toulousain-e-s! And the TSE research environment is rich and welcoming, with a strong sense of a common goal.
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