My name is Elías Cisneros, I am a postdoctoral researcher and Marie-Sklodowska Curie fellow at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Göttingen. Currently, I am a visiting scholar at the Department of Geography & the Environment at UT Austin.
My areas of research are the political economy of environmental degradation, development economics, and conflict economics. In particular, I combine spatial data on biophysical conditions with exogenous market and political shocks to investigate human behavior and the transformation of landscapes. Remotely sensed high-resolution and high-frequency data on forest losses, fires, as well as geo-coded policies and social media data allow me to explore the dynamic processes of the economy and policy. I thereby aim to inform society and policymakers for better governance of the environment.
I studied economics at the University of Freiburg where I received my diploma in 2012. At the University of Bonn, I first worked as a research assistant at the Center for Development Research (2012-2015) and later as a research and teaching assistant at the Institute for Food and Resource Economics (2015-2017). In 2017, I received my doctoral degree and subsequently took a year of parent leave before joining the Chair of International Economic Policy at the University of Göttingen in 2018. Since 2021, I lead the EU funded individual research project “From human to planetary health: Global land-use impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic” (PlanetHealth; GA No. 101031461).