This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: As a kid growing up in North Carolina, Prakash Mishra was interested in planets. "My parents got me a telescope when I turned 6 or 7, and that was my personality for probably 10 years," he says, noting that he thought he would eventually study physics or astrophysics.
But a series of what he calls "happy accidents" led him down a different path. He went to the University of Pennsylvania to study biochemical engineering but ended up earning a bachelor's degree in economics in 2019. Six years later, he completed a doctorate, also at Penn, in applied economics.
Now, after a year at Dartmouth College as a Globalization Postdoctoral Fellow, Mishra has joined Caltech as an assistant professor of economics. His research focuses on how to preserve environmental services provided by nature, such as carbon sequestration and water filtration, without undercutting economic development, using global- or continent-scale data to inform empirical answers to hard policy trade-offs. For example, in a recent paper published in The Review of Economic Studies, Mishra explored protected land—including wilderness areas but also working farmland, managed forests and cultural landscapes—over four decades in the European Union and analyzed the causal effect of protection on vegetation cover and nighttime lights.
Mishra and his co-authors found, surprisingly, no meaningful impacts on either outcome. But the takeaway of this work was not to stop protecting land, Mishra says. Instead, he and his co-authors argue that the incentives for land protection in the EU were poorly designed.
"The EU Commission would set area-based targets to protect land, but it was local governments who chose how to site protected areas," he says. "Local governments, beholden to their voters, chose to protect land at little risk of development and with protection frameworks that still allowed human use. This work connects to a broader research agenda of mine on designing market incentives that actually serve the dual goals of environmental conservation and economic development." We recently spoke with Mishra about his path to environmental economics, the projects that currently excite him and what he's looking forward to at Caltech.
In high school, my friend and I decided to enter a North Carolina-wide science fair, but it was not obvious how we would write a paper about astrophysics. We had read news articles about algaculture—specifically, using algae to clean up chimneys on a polluting factory. We thought, "This is amazing!
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