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At AgroParisTech, 16 rue Claude Bernard in Paris, at 4:00 pm, Loïc Henry will defend his thesis: " Essais sur l'économie du changement climatique : atténuation et adaptation du secteur agricole",  prepared under the supervision of Stéphane De Cara.

Abstract:

This thesis addresses economic issues related to climate change,from both a mitigation and an adaptation perspective and with a focus on the implications for agriculture. In the first chapter, I propose a quantitative analysis of the economics literature on climate change for over more than forty years. I show that climate change has become increasingly prominent in the discipline. From a textual categorization of the content of articles using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, I suggest that the literature is structured around approaches on global mitigation of climate change on the one hand and empirical analyses of the sectoral implications of climate change on the other hand. The second chapter examines the performances of a tax on greenhouse gas from agriculture in the presence of monitoring costs. Using an analytical model, I characterize the optimal partial coverage of an emission tax. The issue is then investigated using an agricultural supply model representative of European agriculture. The empirical application shows that exempting the lowest emitting farms limits monitoring costs, while providing an incentive to efficiently reduce emissions. In the third chapter, I study the adaptation strategies in agriculture when modifying the production areas is made difficult by the presence of Geographical Indication. I develop a stylized model to analyze adaptation patterns taking into account the strong link between the quality of the product and the characteristics of the area of production. The model shows that the relocation of production as an adaptation strategy can be made difficult by the induced redistribution of rents between historical producers and new entrants.