2026 Theses Doctoral

Essays in Biodiversity and Ecosystem Economics

Lu, Jessie

Human activity has led and will continue to lead to large-scale ecosystem change. This change has potentially meaningful impacts on human welfare, yet causal estimates remain sparse. This dissertation contributes to an emerging environmental economics literature that leverages natural experiments resulting from ecological shocks for causal identification. The chapters presented here draw from ecological insights around measurement and mechanisms, combining these with traditional causal inference methods from economics.

Chapter 1 focuses on Southern Africa, where habitat fragmenting fences led to mammalian herbivore declines and enabled a form of grassland degradation known as encroachment. Grassland loss translates to economic costs via lower cattle production. Chapter 2 shows that the Emerald Ash Borer, an invasive beetle lethal to trees, was more prevalent in more marginalized neighborhoods in Chicago, potentially indicating differences in adaptation capacity.

Finally, Chapter 3 examines the joint effects of climate change and biodiversity loss and finds that in the case of wildfires in the American West, climate change impacts become more salient in the presence of biodiversity shocks. Together, these chapters lay the groundwork for future interdisciplinary research addressing underexplored questions on the welfare impacts of biodiversity loss and ecosystem change.