Aslihan Arslan leads multiple research projects related to agricultural productivity, climate resilience, rural out migration and climate change mitigation potential of agricultural practices promoted by IFAD and others. She also leads some impact assessments of IFAD projects related to these themes, and co-leads the 2019 RDR on Investing in Rural Youth.
Prior to joining IFAD in 2017, Arslan worked as a Natural Resource Economist at the Agricultural Development Economics Division (ESA) of FAO, where she worked primarily on Climate Smart Agriculture. Before that, she worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Economist at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany, where she conducted research on migration, inequality and poverty, as well as the impacts of trademarking on Ethiopian coffee prices.
She holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Davis, where she specialized on agricultural development and natural resource economics. Her dissertation was an investigation into the subjective values of traditional maize varieties for smallholders in rural Mexico using theoretical and empirical modeling.
