At the Competence-Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation (CC-ME) we advise and support EU policy making through ex-post causal evaluation and data-driven microeconomic analysis. The CC-ME hosts a Microeconometric Seminar Series to promote discussions with external researchers from academia and other institutions. Our Seminar Series is intended to disseminate advanced research methodologies and topics in the field of microeconomic evaluation. To further disseminate the benefits of our Series across the JRC, we post a summary of the presented papers together with the presenters' views and opinions on their research and the future of the field of Applied Economics. |
This week we had the pleasure to have Christian Stetter from ETH Zurich present his paper on Identifying heterogeneous impacts of agri-environmental schemes using generalized random forests.
In his co-authored paper with Philipp Mennig and Johannes Sauer, they combine economic theory with a novel machine learning method to identify the environmental effectiveness of agri-environment schemes (AES) at the farm level. The authors develop a set of more than 130 contextual predictors to assess the individual impact of participating in AES.
Results from their empirical application for Southeast Germany suggest the existence of heterogeneous, but limited effects of agri-environment measures in several environmental dimensions such as climate change mitigation, clean water and soil health. They demonstrate the importance of considering the individual farming context in agricultural policy evaluation and provide important insights into the improved targeting of AES along several domains.
To learn more about Christian’s work and opinions about the future of the field of Applied Economics we asked him to briefly answer to a series of questions. You can find his answer to each of our questions below.
Q: What attracted you to research the topics in your paper? A: Large amounts of public money are granted [to] farmers to improve their environmental performance through so-called agri-environmental schemes. However, the effectiveness of these schemes is widely underexplored, which calls for novel approaches to evaluate their environmental impacts at the micro-level. |
Q: Where is the research area where your paper fits moving? A: Agricultural economics is increasingly affected by the credibility revolution. Traditional research approaches are more and more replaced by modern (quasi-)experimental methods. |
Q: What, in your opinion, will the next breakthrough in Applied Economics be? A: I am convinced that the combination of novel methods coming from the machine learning literature and solid identification strategies from causal inference and economics will yield important insights across many applied economics disciplines. |
The CC-ME team would like to congratulate Christian for his insightful research and thank him for presenting it in our Seminar Series.
For more information on the upcoming presentations and how to participate in our Seminar Series please visit our dedicated website.
| Originally Published | Last Updated | 13 Sep 2023 | 11 Mar 2024 |
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