Published on September 4, 2024 – Updated on October 11, 2024

Chaire Professeur Junior


Pierre Biscaye
Chaire Professeur Junior, CERDI-UCA-CNRS-IRD
pierrebiscaye.com


Pierre Biscaye completed his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California - Berkeley in March 2024, under advisors Ethan Ligon, Ted Miguel, and Maximilian Auffhammer. His dissertation analyzes how environmental shocks---including desert locust swarms, floods, and epidemic disease---affect household livelihood decisions, focusing particularly on agricultural communities in sub-Saharan Africa.  

Before completing his PhD, Pierre was a Research & Strategic Initiatives Manager at the Evans School Policy Analysis & Research Group (EPAR) from 2014-2018, and earned a Master's of Public Administration with a concentration in International Development from the University of Washington Evans School in 2014. He previously worked from 2009-2012 for Africare and World Vision International on projects in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Kenya, and Malawi, and growing up lived for 10 years in Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, and Cambodia.

Pierre is a development economist whose work combines natural experiments, randomized controlled trials, and applied econometric tools with economic theory to explore questions in agricultural, environmental/energy, and labor economics. He has conducted field work in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania in support of his research but primarily uses publicly-available survey, spatial, satellite, and administrative data. His current work touches on issues of household labor supply and livelihood decisions, climate change and agricultural transformation, conflict, and energy primarily in African countries.