Dr. Leah Bevis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at the Ohio State University and was hired under the University’s Discovery Theme, Initiative for Food and AgriCultural Transformation (InFACT). She is also a member of the International Food Policy Research Institute’s project Advancing Research on Nutrition and Agriculture, as well as an affiliate with the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative. Leah completed her PhD at Cornell University’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, where Christopher Barrett was her Chair. Leah’s research examines the factors that drive chronic poverty in poor, agricultural settings. That means she often focuses on agricultural productivity and/or linked dynamics between biophysical systems and human welfare. A few of her projects focus on soils, agriculture, and micronutrient malnutrition; for example, she investigates linkages between soil minerals/metals, crop mineral concentration, and human mineral status in Nepal, India, and Malawi. She also examines the long-run implications of Green Revolution technologies for rural inequality and nutritional status in India. Much of Leah’s work focuses on measurement error, a chronic problem in agricultural data and climate data. For example, one of her papers explores the implications of farmers’ misreporting and misperception of land size when it comes to measuring agricultural intensification in Africa. She is also working on a paper regarding measurement error in gridded data. In addition, Leah is interested in linkages between health and poverty—both in the United States and abroad. Some of her work investigates intergenerational income and human capital transmission—and particularly the role of maternal education and maternal health on child health. She is slowly moving into work on (agro-)forestry and climate change adaptation/mitigation in poor agricultural settings. In 2020, she began new, policy-relevant work on mental/behavioral crisis response in Columbus and other U.S. cities—how it works now and how to improve it.
External Links:
https://leahbevis.com/
