ESPP Doctoral Candidate Ben Gramig
Contact: Anisa Abid, News Writer for Environmental Science and Policy Program: (517) 432-3823 or abidanis@msu.edu
January 02, 2008
As Ben Gramig, doctoral candidate in the Department of Agricultural Economics and ESPP, finishes his final year at MSU, he prepares to enter the world of teaching at Purdue University, where he has been hired as assistant professor of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics. At MSU, Gramig's research blends economics, public policy and decision making, to improve management of livestock disease.
Gramig's research looks at the economics behind livestock disease management and the influence of policy design on farm decision-making. He examines whether government policies eradicate diseases effectively, by looking at whether farmers invest in biosecurity (management actions or investments that reduce the risk of infection) and report diseases in their livestock in response to economic incentives. The government's current response to disease outbreak includes restriction on moving livestock and livestock culling, with farmers paid for their culled livestock. While the incentives created by this policy lead farmers to report disease outbreaks, Gramig found that when the disease levels fall to a low enough level "the incentive flips," and farmers reduce the rate at which they invest in biosecurity, which can lead to resurgence in disease. Analysis of epidemiology together with economic and social behaviors is needed to make sounder policies. Gramig said, "If you don't account for feedbacks between disease dynamics and economic or behavioral dynamics... analysis of coupled natural and human systems is incomplete, and the insights into policy design may be limited."
Gramig said that the ESPP courses he has taken complemented his other studies at MSU through their systems approach, which is reflected in his research's integration of human/social behaviors with epidemiology.
He is currently finalizing his dissertation, tentatively titled, 'Essays on the Economics of Livestock Disease Management: On-farm Biosecurity Adoption, Asymmetric Information in Policy Design, and Decentralized Bioeconomic Dynamics.' His thesis consists of three essays addressing theoretical and empirical economic dimensions of livestock disease management. Two of these essays are currently under review at journals and the third will be submitted following the defense of his dissertation this winter.
