Department/Group
Alumni
Xavier Vollenweider
Former PhD student
Xavier’s PhD is on the management of climate risk and market risk in agriculture. He is interested both in developed and developing countries, focusing on Ireland and Ethiopia as case studies.
His research is done in partnership with Teagasc, a semi-state research centre of the Department of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries in Ireland. He received a four-year Walsh fellowship in October 2009.
Teaching 2011 (GTA):
Background
Xavier obtained a MA in international relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies and Development in Geneva before completing a MSc at the University College London in Environmental and Resource Economics.
Research interests
- State-contingent production function;
- Quantile regression for panel data;
- Randomised controlled trial and placebo effects;
- Vulnerability analysis;
- Inequality decomposition;
- Risk management (index insurance, forward contract, social network);
- Climate smart agriculture.Research articles
2014
A simple framework for the estimation of climate exposure
This article introduces a new methodology to estimate climate exposure at the household’s level with the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) as its building block. As the probability distribution of … read more »
2011
Risk preferences and voluntary agri-environmental schemes: does risk aversion explain the uptake of the Rural Environment Protection Scheme?
The lowering of trade barriers under the successive reforms of the pillar I of the Common Agricultural Policy, the opening of the commodity markets to an … read more »
The impact of risk on inequality: evidence from the Irish agricultural sector
The goal of the present paper is to test the hypothesis that risk has an impact on inequality. Many studies investigating the behaviour of farmers under … read more »
