On Monday, October 20, Valentin Cocco will defend his thesis “Hedgerow-nomics — Economic analyses of agricultural landscape changes”, under the supervision of Raja Chakir (PSAE, INRAE) and Lauriane Mouysset (CIRED, CNRS).
This thesis examines past and future transformations of agricultural landscapes through an economic lens. The first three chapters investigate drivers of landscape elements of high environmental value, with particular attention to hedgerows. Chapter 1 contributes to the debate on the landscape impacts of consolidation policy by estimating, using difference-in-differences, a significant but moderate negative effect of the French program on Normandy’s hedgerows. Chapter 2 questions the environmental effectiveness of the Common Agricultural Policy’s green payments, as manipulation-robust regression discontinuity designs mostly fail to distinguish genuine additions of landscape elements from systematic differences between treated and exempt farms. Chapter3, by training random forest models to predict hedgerow maintenance and planting, highlights a shift in planting patterns from historical,livestock-related factors to emerging, cultivation and sociodemographic ones. Chapter 4 takes a normative perspective, simulating policy scenarios with a dynamic, spatially explicit bioeconomic model, to demonstrate how ecological networks reconcile production and conservation. Taken together, this thesis reveals how dynamic policy, economic, and ecological conditions shape changes in agricultural landscapes.
On Monday, October 20, at 3:30 p.m., at CIRED (Nogent-sur-Marne, amphitheater in Building 1).