Chloé Antoine

Welcome! I am a PhD student in economics at CREST — École Polytechnique, advised by Prof. Jean-Marc Bourgeon and Prof. Gregory Corcos.

My research interests lie in the fields of environmental economics and international trade. My work centers on a feedback loop: (i) how trade and policy reshape land use and biodiversity, and (ii) how biodiversity in turn feeds back into productivity. To do so, I rely on both theoretical and empirical approaches, with a special enthusiasm for quantitative trade models and geospatial data.

From January to July 2026, I visited the Harvard Kennedy School as a Fulbright Fellow, hosted by Prof. Wolfram Schlenker.

You can find details on my academic background in my CV.

NEWS: I received the FAERE 2026 Young Economist Award.

I am on the 2026-2027 job market.

• Email: chloe.antoine@ensae.fr
• Address: Office 4100, ENSAE Paris, France

• Agricultural productivity and biodiversity effects: theory and evidence
  (with Jean-Marc Bourgeon & José De Sousa)
  R&R at Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
  paper
  Agricultural specialization maximizes land use efficiency but it also amplifies pest pressure, thereby requiring heavy pesticide use. This paper evaluates the economic benefits of reducing specialization to leverage natural pest control. We develop a model in which the resilience of a farmer’s field is endogenous to the crop and pesticide choices of neighboring farmers. We account for both within-crop and between-crop cross-field externalities. Using global data on 40 crops and 39,116 counties, we estimate the impact of these externalities on crop productivity with instrumental variables constructed from agro-climatic suitability measures. Our results show that a one-percent increase in crop diversity raises crop yields by 1.3 to 1.8%, while a one-percentage-point increase in a crop’s own farmland share lowers that crop’s yield by 9 to 13%. Counterfactual simulations indicate that revenue-maximizing reallocation would roughly double the diversity of crops grown and that even a marginal reduction in specialization raises production.
• Agriculture, trade and biodiversity
  Job Market Paper
  FAERE Young Economist Best Paper Award 2026
  Does agricultural trade liberalization erode biodiversity, or can it help preserve it? I build and estimate a new Ricardian general-equilibrium model with explicit extensive and intensive margins of land use, in which biodiversity is both an endogenous outcome and a determinant of production. Calibrated across 66 countries and 822,053 fields, it reproduces reduced-form evidence I document without being asked to match it. For birds, a premier indicator of ecosystem health, model counterfactuals show that trade preserves biodiversity. It delivers land sparing at the scale of the trading system: on net, the habitat released saves more species than intensification costs. Observed liberalization avoids about twelve bird extinctions, six percent of what agriculture has already committed, and shutting agricultural trade down altogether would commit nine times as many. Because species loss feeds back to farm productivity, undoing that liberalization would also cost farmers at least $2.2 billion a year in sales, from bird ecosystem services alone. However, these aggregate gains conceal a steep distributional cost, as production shifts toward biodiversity-rich regions. Finally, of the restrictions I consider, only a shutdown of trade in meat and dairy improves biodiversity, at almost no welfare cost.

• Ricardo goes green: a quantitative spatial analysis of pesticide regulation's effects
  (with Jean-Marc Bourgeon & José De Sousa)
  Globalization reshapes agricultural production not only by reallocating output across regions but also by intensifying the spatial concentration of crops. This paper develops a general-equilibrium model in which agricultural productivity is endogenously determined through ecological feedbacks. As trade integration lowers costs, countries expand cultivation of their comparative advantage crops, increasing land- share concentration. This concentration heightens pest pressure and reduces yields. Farmers respond by raising pesticide intensity, mitigating yield losses at the cost of greater environmental externalities. The model links trade-driven specialization, pesticide use, and productivity, allowing us to assess how environmental policies can propagate through international markets. In particular, the framework allows us to quantify the welfare and ecological impacts of tighter pesticide regulation in the European Union.
• Bounded by nature: agricultural diversification and the extensive margins of trade
  Agricultural diversification can enhance sustainability by improving resilience to climate shocks and reducing environmental pressures associated with monoculture systems. I propose a short-run theory of the agricultural extensive margins, comprising a domestic margin, an international margin, and a bilateral margin that disaggregates exports by destination. A key contribution is to account for agroecological constraints, which allows for more meaningful comparisons of diversification patterns across countries with different climatic and geographic conditions. To apply the theory, I build a new dataset covering all three margins for 155 countries, 1992-2017. I document a set of stylized facts and then use a gravity framework to quantify the effects of globalization and international agreements. I find stable production diversity alongside markedly rising export diversity, strong positive effects of globalization, and a positive association with joint WTO membership.

• 2026
  Harvard International Economics Graduate Workshop [Cambridge MA], CESCO Seminar [online], Salata Environmental Economics Weekly Meeting [Cambridge MA], Harvard Environmental Economics Graduate Workshop [Cambridge MA], Duke UPEP Seminar [Durham NC], RMET Conference [Banff AB], Big Sky Workshop [Bozeman MT], FAERE Conference [Dijon FR], CREST PhD Seminar [Palaiseau FR, exp.], CREST Internal Seminar [Palaiseau FR, exp.]
• 2025
  INRAE SMART Seminar [Rennes FR], EAERE Winter School [Annecy FR], E4C Summer School [Palaiseau FR], CREST PhD Seminar x2 [Palaiseau FR], AMSE PhD Seminar [Marseille FR], EAERE 30th Annual Conference [Bergen NO], BioEcon 26th Annual Conference [Cambridge UK], FAERE 12th Annual Conference [Nantes FR], ETSG 26th Annual Conference [Milan IT], CEE-M Seminar [Montpellier FR]
• 2024
  CREST Internal Seminar x2 [Palaiseau FR], USSEE 13th Biennial Conference [online], PSAE Internal Seminar [Palaiseau FR], CREST 1st-year PhD Workshop [Palaiseau FR]

• Introduction to economics — École Polytechnique
  — Cycle ingénieur, Prof. O. Gossner & J.-B. Michau [Spring 2024]
  — B.Sc., Prof. Y. Koriyama & J.-B. Michau [Fall 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026]
• International trade — ENSAE
  — M.Sc., Prof. G. Corcos [Fall 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026]
• International economics — École Polytechnique
  — Cycle ingénieur, Prof. G. Corcos [Spring 2025]

• Non-academic interests — In my free time I enjoy watching movies, hiking, reading comic books, cooking vegetarian food, taking photographs and playing the bass. I regularly update this list with movies I like to watch when feeling 'happy-sad'. Currently on repeat: Noname, Rainforest.

• Website — I am grateful to Paul Patault for helping me build this website, which design is inspired by that of Gautam Rao. Your visit here produced only 0.05 g of CO2. Check your own website's carbon footprint and learn how to reduce it.

• Friends — Explore my office mates' research

  ← 🌱 4100's webring 🌱 →