Christopher Barrett
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Christopher Barrett is an agricultural and development economist at Cornell University, where Chris is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and an International Professor of Agriculture at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, a Professor in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, Faculty Director of the Cornell Collaboration on International Development Economics Research, and a Senior Faculty Fellow of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. He edits the Palgrave Macmillan book series Agricultural Economics and Food Policy and serves on the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
He is an elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, and the African Association of Agricultural Economists, and an Honorary Life Member of the International Association of Agricultural Economists. He has won numerous university, national and international awards for teaching, research, policy outreach, and public service.
His more than 400 publications have been cited more than 74,000 times, placing him among the top five scholars globally in the agricultural economics, development economics, food security, poverty, and resource economics fields.
According to Google Scholar, well within the top 1 percent of all economists worldwide according to RePEc/IDEAS, and in the top 50 economics and finance scholars globally per research.com. He has supervised more than 150 graduate students and post-docs, many of whom now serve on faculty and staff at leading universities and research institutes worldwide. He has held senior leadership roles at Cornell, including as the Deputy Dean and Dean of Academic Affairs of the SC Johnson College of Business, and as the David J. Nolan Director of the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, as well as externally as President of the Association of Christian Economists, and on a variety of boards and panels. He was previously on faculty at Utah State University and has been a visiting faculty member at Harvard, Melbourne, Monash, Notre Dame, Stanford, and UC-San Diego.
Christopher Barrett joins the Paris IAS in Arpil 2027 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Food policy; food security; food systems transformation; humanitarian response; poverty traps; resilience; risk management.
Risk and the Uncomfortable Reality of Poverty Traps
Poverty traps are widely understood as arising due to insufficient capital. The shift in perspective advanced by this project is subtle because poverty and lack of capital go hand-in-hand with greater uninsured exposure to catastrophic risk of disease, of workplace injury, of violence, of theft, of unemployment, of homelessness, etc. Some poor beat the odds and escape destitution, while some non-poor suffer catastrophic misfortune and never recover.
Reconceptualizing the etiology of poverty traps matters for policy. It implies an emphasis on risk mitigation: e.g., vaccines, improved agricultural technologies to help smallholder farmers manage abiotic and biotic stresses, occupational safety measures to protect workers from injury, efforts to dampen climate change, etc. Ever-ready safety nets also become essential, from effective emergency medicine systems to handle health shocks, to humanitarian response systems that safeguard basic human rights to food and shelter, to peacekeeping and police systems that protect people from violence.
Those living in material comfort, upon encountering homeless, disfigured, or destitute people, often delude themselves that are immune from such predicaments. The uncomfortable reality is that some intrinsically flawed people, living in an imperfect, risky world, enjoy protections denied to much of humankind. By explaining the origins of poverty traps in uninsured catastrophic risk exposure in a non-technical way, using examples from poor communities worldwide, this project seeks to build understanding of, and a shared commitment to address, poverty traps.
Publications clés
Nathaniel D. Jensen, Francesco P. Fava, Andrew G. Mude, Christopher B. Barrett, Brenda Wandera-Gache, Anton Vrieling, Masresha Taye, Kazushi Takahashi, Felix Lung, Munenobu Ikegami, Polly Ericksen, Philemon Chelang’a, Sommarat Chantarat, Michael R. Carter, Hassan Bashir, et Rupsha Banerjee, Escaping Poverty Traps And Unlocking Prosperity In The Face Of Climate Risk: Lessons From IBLI, Cambridge University Press, 2024
Christopher B. Barrett, Michael R. Carter et Jean-Paul Chavas, editors, The Economics of Poverty Traps, Chicago: University of Chicago Press and National Bureau of Economic Research, 2019
Christopher B. Barrett, editor, Food Security and Sociopolitical Stability, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013
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