Research

Job Market Paper

Climate Change, Comparative Advantages, and Structural Transformation in Agriculture [Paper] [Slides]
Climate change is expected to reshape agricultural productivity and comparative advantages across countries, with important consequences for economic welfare. Yet these consequences depend not only on where productivity changes, but also on how countries consume, produce, and trade. This paper investigates how consumption patterns and international trade shape the unequal welfare consequences of climate change. I combine rich, spatially disaggregated data on crop-specific agricultural productivity under alternative climate conditions with bilateral trade flows and country-level expenditure data in a multi-country Ricardian general equilibrium trade model with non-homothetic preferences. I find that climate-induced productivity shocks reduce global welfare by 0.72% of world GDP, with particularly large losses in lower-middle-income economies. A welfare decomposition reveals that the price effect dominates the structural change effect, which captures income-driven adjustments in consumption expenditure shares. Counterfactual simulations further show that differences in food expenditure shares amplify welfare losses in poorer economies. Finally, export restrictions by major agricultural suppliers exacerbate these losses, while removing existing export taxes can partially mitigate them. These findings highlight how consumption exposure and international trade policies shape the unequal economic consequences of climate change.

Working Papers

Total Factor Productivity, Markup and the Role of Climate Change, with Lota Tamini. [Paper] [Slides]
We use establishment-level data from Canada to examine how climate shocks affect productivity and markup in the agri-food sector. Our empirical strategy separates productivity measurement from markup recovery. We estimate total factor productivity using a two-step estimator that is robust to optimization errors in input choices, unobserved cost shocks, and measurement errors in proxy variables. Firm-level markups are recovered under cost minimization as the ratio of the output elasticity of materials to their revenue share, with the required elasticities obtained from a Generalized Leontief cost system. Extreme temperature events reduce firm sales and productivity while raising marginal costs. Climate shocks compress markups, while price responses remain small, suggesting that agri-food firms absorb climate-induced cost increases through lower markups rather than passing them to consumers. Single-product firms experience significant declines in both productivity and markups. Responses also vary across multi-product firms, underscoring the role of firm characteristics in shaping vulnerability to climate shocks.

Climate Shocks, Market Access, and Firm Export Dynamics, with Lota Tamini.
We study how climate shocks shape exporters' behavior along the intensive and extensive margins of trade. Using detailed Canadian food-manufacturing firm data from 2000 to 2022 combined with high-resolution daily weather data, we develop a multi-stage empirical framework that combines firm-level productivity estimation with structural gravity. This framework allows us to distinguish three channels through which climate shocks affect exports: firm productivity, domestic market-access costs, and adjustments in multilateral resistance. Extreme heat reduces firm productivity and worsens firms' access to foreign markets. Our decomposition shows that the direct domestic market-access-cost channel is substantially larger than the productivity channel, while outward multilateral-resistance adjustments partially offset these losses. The total effect implies that one additional degree-day above 29°C reduces firm exports by approximately 0.115 percent. Climate shocks also affect firms' extensive margins. Extreme heat reduces the number of foreign destinations served and narrows product scope within destination markets. It also lowers the probability that existing firm-destination relationships survive. Taken together, these findings show that the trade effects of climate shocks extend beyond production losses and operate through firms' ability to access, serve, and remain active in foreign markets.

Publications

Global value chains, labor productivity, and inclusive growth in Africa: Empirical evidence from heterogeneous panel methods (2020), with Jeffrey Kouton. Journal of Social and Economic Development, 23, 1–23. [Paper]

The dynamic impact of renewable energy consumption on economic growth: The case of Côte d'Ivoire (2019), with Jeffrey Kouton. Journal of Economics and Sustainable Development, 10(18), 167–174. [Paper]

Work in Progress

Fiscal Spending and Import Leakages: Evidence from Public Procurement.

Policy Work

Ouedraogo, A., M. Coulibaly, F. Koné, S. Amonle, K. Nayihouba, F. Dieng, and K. K. Koné (2025). Evaluating How Fiscal Policy Shapes Gender Disparities in Togo: A Pilot Study in West Africa. World Bank, Poverty, Equity and Gender Global Practice.

World Bank (2022). World Development Report 2022: Finance for an Equitable Recovery. Washington, DC: World Bank. [Report]

World Bank (2025). Listening to Citizens of Ukraine Survey. [Web]