Chloé Antoine

Welcome! I am a PhD student in economics at CREST — École Polytechnique, advised by Jean-Marc Bourgeon and Gregory Corcos. From January to July 2026, I visited the Harvard Kennedy School as a Fulbright Fellow, hosted by Wolfram Schlenker.

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.

For more details, download my CV.

NEWS: I received the FAERE 2026 Young Economist Award.

I am on the 2026-2027 job market.

• Agriculture, trade and biodiversity
  FAERE Young Economist Best Paper Award 2026
  request
  Does agricultural trade liberalization erode biodiversity, or can it help preserve it? I build and estimate a new multicountry 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. For birds, a premier indicator of ecosystem health, model counterfactuals show that trade preserves global 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 spares about 26 bird species from eventual global extinction and averts some 2,200 local extinctions, in both cases about a tenth of what agriculture has already committed. Liberalization also keeps more insect-eating birds in agricultural landscapes; through the ecosystem services these birds provide, undoing it would cost farmers worldwide about $5.5 billion a year in sales. However, the gain is unevenly shared: about a fifth of ecoregions lose species even as the global count improves. Finally, mapping how extinctions respond to region-to-region trade costs shows that the best trade policy for biodiversity is not free trade but an asymmetric one: open to the tropics, costlier for meat and dairy imports into East Asia and Europe.

• 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.
• Bounded by nature, limited by markets: the extensive margins of agricultural trade
  request
  Soil, terrain and climate fix what a country can grow; fixed costs determine what it exports. I build a gravity model of the agricultural extensive margins for 155 countries over 1992–2017, normalized by agroecological potential from FAO-GAEZ. Only the single market and a country’s own WTO accession move the margin, and the effect falls on crops facing plant-health inspection and residue testing. I then let climate change move the feasible set, and use the crop-level estimates to predict what exposed countries can still source and sell. The crops at risk are disproportionately those facing inspection and residue testing: adaptation through trade depends less on tariffs than on the regulatory cost of reaching a market.

• 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.
• Maritime transport, marine biodiversity and carbon
  with Jeanne Astier
  Shipping’s carbon is priced. Its local ecological costs, from nutrient deposition and physical disturbance to the movement of species between ports, are not. Carbon damage rises with distance travelled; ecological damage does not. So pricing carbon alone, as the EU has done since 2024, pushes ships toward short routes and slow steaming that may be ecologically worse. This paper develops a routing model in which trade volumes are given but paths are chosen, and shows that the curvature of ecological damage determines whether traffic should be concentrated into corridors or dispersed across them: land sparing versus land sharing, at sea. The model is taken to 1.6 million container voyages and satellite measures of marine productivity.

• 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], CREST-INSEE Workshop [Montrouge 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. In the wild, you can usually find me behind binoculars looking for birds and bears, both of which I am slightly obsessed with. 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

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