Helene Ollivier

Does Trade Make Firms Cleaner?

Hélène Ollivier recently published a paper in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, co-authored with Geoffrey Barrows, on how Indian firms respond to an increase in competition by modifying their product mix, which shows that emission intensity can decline due to these product mix adjustments. This research agenda aims at revealing the interaction between international trade and innovation from the perspective of developing countries.

Hélène Ollivier's primary research interests focus on the link between trade liberalisation and the environment, in a world where countries do not fully cooperate on environmental – and especially climate – issues. Her second research interests focus on the political economy constraints on environmental policies, and especially on how heterogeneous beliefs and political competition can influence the outcome of democratic elections.

Ms Ollivier's current research agenda that she plans to pursue while at CESifo focuses on trade as a mechanism that spreads the impacts of disasters across countries or regions, as well as offers a channel to limit their impacts on each region's welfare. In particular, she looks at the impacts of typhoons on the agricultural markets in the Philippines.

Hélène Ollivier is Research Fellow in Economics of the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) and Associate Professor of the Paris School of Economics (PSE). She holds a PhD in Economics from Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, and she spent two years (2010-2012) as a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Agricultural and Resource Economics (ARE) department at the University of California, Berkeley. She became Research Fellow of the CNRS in 2012. Additionally, she was affiliated to the Chair of Resource Economics at ETH Zurich in 2013 and 2014. And she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the ARE department at the University of California, Berkeley, in Spring 2015.