Nicholas Tyack
Assistant Professor, Van Vliet Professorship

My primary area of research focuses on the economic value of genetic resources and biodiversity, and in particular on how farmers and members of the public value crop diversity. I am also interested in the economics of innovation in agriculture, and how innovations (such as crop varieties) can be successfully diffused from one setting to another, as well as environmental and development economics more broadly. In my recent work, I have started to work in the area of experimental and behavioral economics, and am interested in using field experiments to investigate research questions related to farmer decision-making, experimentation behavior, technology adoption, and valuation of novel crop varieties.

Agricultural and Resource Economics

Tyack N, Ščasny M. (2020): ‘Warehouse’ or research centre? Analyzing public preferences for conservation, pre-breeding and characterization activities at the Czech genebank. Food Security. Available here.

Tyack N, Dempewolf H, Khoury, C. (2020): The potential of payment for ecosystem services for crop wild relative conservation. Plants 9(10), 1305. Available here.

Tyack N, Manneh B, Konate A, Kessy, T, Traore A, Sie M. (2019): Twenty years of participatory varietal selection at AfricaRice: Lessons from farmer involvement in variety development. In: Apert J and Baert J (Eds.) Farmers and Plant Breeding: Current Approaches and Perspectives. Routledge, p. 65-69. Available here.

Tyack N, Ščasny M. (2018): Social valuation of genebank activities: assessing public demand for genetic resource conservation in the Czech Republic. Sustainability 10: 3997. Available here.

Tyack N, Dempewolf, H. (2015): The Economics of Crop Wild Relatives under Climate Change. In: Redden, R., Yadav, S.S., Maxted, N., Dulloo, M.E., Guarino, L., Smith, P.J (Eds.) Crop Wild Relatives and Climate Change. Wiley-Blackwell, p. 281-291. Available here.

Best Ph.D. Presentation, Agricultural Economics Society Annual Conference (2021)

I acknowledge the following past sources of research funding: the Swiss National Science Foundation, which provided funding for my Doc.Mobility research exchange with the University of Heidelberg; the Genebank Impacts Fellowship, which helped fund the implementation of a farmer field experiment on genetic resource valuation in collaboration with the AfricaRice genebank in Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire; the Grant Agency of Charles University, which funded an earlier research project to investigate public preferences for crop diversity conservation in the Czech Republic; and finally, the Fulbright Program, for its support of my research on the economic value of crop wild relatives in collaboration with the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship (AREC230) – Winter Term 2022