Nicolas Astier is a professor at Paris School of Economics and a researcher at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées ParisTech. His main research area is energy and environmental economics, with a deep interest in the on-going transformation of the electricity industry and the decarbonation of fossil-fuel intensive sectors. He talks about his most recent work in this interview with PSE…

It is difficult to say to what extent we can rely on the growth curves in our family health booklets to understand people’s growth patterns in the past. Uncertainty remains because sources that follow substantial numbers of children over a long period before the middle of the 20th century are rare. The proxy method, which consists of calculating averages…

Every year, agriculture is responsible for a loss of 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil (UNCCD, 2017). This loss implies major risks in food security and crop sustainability worldwide. There is an urgent need to understand and foresee the impact of agriculture on soil fertility since food demand will keep increasing in the next decades, pushed by population growth…

A drastic decrease in greenhouse gas emissions is needed to tackle climate change. Carbon pricing, in the form of a carbon tax or a carbon market, is considered by economists as the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions. However, there is to date little evidence on the impact of existing carbon price instruments on emissions. In 2013, the UK introduced a carbon tax in its power sector, the Carbon Price Support (CPS)…

The past decade is characterized by an increasing attention to multinational firms (MNF) behavior not paying their fair share of taxes, which led to a pressing demand to reform international corporate taxation. In 2016, the United States started a debate about whether we should maintain a tax system based on the source principle, where firms are taxed where they produce, or whether we should shift the tax system…

In poor countries with populations that are very dependent on agriculture, the impact of extreme weather events can be severe. If safety nets or other transfers do not exist, marriage of under-age daughters could be used as a coping strategy of poor families. A nascent literature in development economics has studied how different marriage institutions…