David Zilberman (; born May 9, 1947) is an Israeli-American agricultural economist, professor and Robinson Chair in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Zilberman has been a professor in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at UC Berkeley since 1979. His research has covered a range of fields including the economics of production technology and risk in agriculture, agricultural and environmental policy, marketing and more recently the economics of climate change, biofuel and biotechnology. He won the 2019 Wolf Prize in Agriculture, he is a member of the US National Academy Science since 2019, was the President of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), and is a Fellow of the AAEA, Association of Environmental and Resource Economics, and the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economics. David is an avid blogger on the Berkeley Blog.
Biography Zilberman was born in Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine. He attended Hebrew University Secondary School. After serving in the Army and working on a Kibutz, he received his B. A. in Economics and Statistics at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and obtained his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979. Zilberman is married to Leorah Abouav-Zilberman and has 3 sons and 6 grandchildren.
Academic career Zilberman has been teaching, conducting research and serving as an extension specialist at UC Berkeley. His research combines, theory, empirical work and outreach. His research mostly addresses either management or policy problems in the nexus of agriculture, natural resources and the environment. He has been involved in major policy debates, including the transition to water markets, regulation and use of pesticides, and biotechnology and biofuel policies. Zilberman's research incorporates features of agronomic and biophysical systems into economic models. His work emphasizes heterogeneity of people and location, as well as dynamics and risk. He has published in academic journals including Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Nature Biotechnology, The American Economic Review, Econometrica, and the Journal of Development Economics. He is the editor of the Annual Review of Resource Economics.
His major areas of research include:
Innovation and technology adoption Economics of adoption The traditional literature of technology diffusion viewed it as a process of imitation. Zilberman modeled diffusion as a result of economic choices by heterogeneous decision makers affected by dynamic processes. Zilberman, Zhao, and Heiman (2013)Zilberman, David, Jinhua Zhao, and Amir Heiman. "Adoption versus adaptation, with emphasis on climate change." Annu. Rev. Resour. Econ. 4, no. 1 (2012): 27-53. that choices of others make people aware of new technology, but they assess it according to their preferences and constraints. Differences in adoption behavior reflect economic and demographic heterogeneity. Dynamic processes such as learning by doingArrow, Kenneth J. "The economic implications of learning by doing." The review of economic studies 29, no. 3 (1962): 155-173. and learning by usingRosenberg, Nathan. "Learning by using." Inside the black box: Technology and economics (1982): 120-140. may reduce the cost and increase the benefit of new technologies and enhance adoption over time. Feder, Just, and Zilberman (1985).Feder, Gershon, Richard E. Just, and David Zilberman (1985). "Adoption of agricultural innovations in developing countries: A survey." Economic development and cultural change 33, no. 2 (1985): 255-298 studied both modelling of adoption choice (to adopt or not) and adoption intensity (how much to adopt) and emphasized the role of risk and risk aversion, lack of access to credit, and tenancy in slowing adoption of modern technology in developing countries.
Economics of innovation The survey by Sunding and Zilberman (2001),Sunding, David, and David Zilberman. "The agricultural innovation process: research and technology adoption in a changing agricultural sector." Handbook of agricultural economics 1 (2001): 207-261 views technological innovations as outcomes of multistage activities (research, development, commercialization, marketing, adoption) affected by economic incentives. They suggest that studies of adoption should explicitly analyze the impact of marketing efforts including, advertisement, money back guarantee, sampling and demonstration.
Graff, Heiman and Zilberman (2002)Graff, Gregory, Amir Heiman, and David Zilberman. "University research and offices of technology transfer." California Management Review 45, no. 1 (2002): 88-115. Harvard emphasize the important role of the educational industrial complex in introducing modern innovations. University research may come with new concepts and the right to develop these technologies may move to startups that may become or taken over by major companies. Excellence in research and development and affective technology transfer mechanisms are becoming key to strength in agriculture and industry.
Biotechnology and bioeconomy Zilberman et al. (2013)Zilberman D, Kaplan S, Kim E, Hochman G, Graff G. Continents divided: Understanding differences between Europe and North America in acceptance of GM crops. GM crops & food. 2013 Jul 9;4(3):202-8 looks at the political economy of biotechnology, especially in cross-continental differences in political economic outcomes with regards to adoption of agricultural biotechnology. This analysis contributed to understanding how the ideologies of GM crops have played out in the U.S. versus Europe and Africa, and the different interest groups that played a role in this dynamic process. Zilberman, Kaplan, and Wesseler (2015)Zilberman, D., Kaplan, S., & Wesseler, J. (2015). The loss from underutilizing GM technologies. AgBioForum, 18(3), 312-319. tried to understand the welfare loss associated with delayed adoption of GM technologies due to regulatory barriers. The article examined the specific context of adoption of Golden Rice, which prevents Vitamin A deficiency, as well as major food crops like corn, wheat, and rice in general. This analysis contributed to understanding welfare implications of lack of GM adoption around the world, using simple economic tools and assumptions about yield effects.
Resource economics Water Caswell and Zilberman (1986)Caswell, Margriet F., and David Zilberman. "The effects of well depth and land quality on the choice of irrigation technology." American Journal of Agricultural Economics 68, no. 4 (1986): 798-811. developed a framework to assess the economics of irrigation technology. This framework distinguished between applied water and effective water (water utilized by the crop). Irrigation efficiency (the ratio of effective to applied water), is higher with modern irrigation technology and on soils with high water holding capacity. They predict that modern irrigation technologies (drip irrigation) will tend to increase yields but may actually increase water use per unit of land. These technologies are more likely to be adopted on sandy soils, higher value crop and locations with higher cost of water. Taylor and Zilberman (2017)Taylor, Rebecca, and David Zilberman. "Diffusion of drip irrigation: The case of California." Applied economic perspectives and policy 39, no. 1 (2017): 16-40. analyze the diffusion of drip irrigation in California, showing that it was first adopted on high value crops, the droughts accelerated the diffusion rate and that the collaboration between extension and private sector was crucial for adapting the technology to different crops and regions.
Zilberman, D., M. Khanna, and L. Lipper (1997),Zilberman, D., M. Khanna, and L. Lipper, "Economics of New Technologies for Sustainable Agriculture," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 41 (1): 63-80, 1997. Khanna and Zilberman (2001)Khanna, M. and D. Zilberman, "Adoption of Energy Efficient Technologies and Carbon Abatement: The Electricity Generating Sector in India," Energy Economics, 23 (6): 637-658, 2001. extended the notion of water use efficiency for studying the incentives for adoption of modern irrigation technologies to thinking more broadly about technologies that can increase input-use efficiency in a range of other contexts and the economic incentives and barriers to their widespread adoption. These technologies included those that increase energy efficiency of power generation in India, fertilizer use efficiency in corn production in the Midwest and other conservation technologies that can lead to sustainable growth. A key contribution of this work was to show how policy distortions can reduce incentives to adopt technologies that are otherwise economically efficient and environmentally preferred.
Zilberman et al., (2008)Zilberman, D., Sproul, T., Rajagopal, D., Sexton, S., & Hellegers, P. (2008). Rising energy prices and the economics of water in agriculture. Water Policy, 10(S1), 11-21. looks at water resource management "in an era of high energy prices". The article found that rising energy prices will hurt pumping of groundwater for agriculture, will increase reliance on hydroelectric, and may cause water to be diverted away from crop agriculture, leading to higher food prices.
Hamilton et al., (2013) models the collective waste disposal problem under network externalities arising from a networked waste disposal system leading to a centralized processing facility. The article found that this setup optimally results in a spatial pattern of worse "local pollution" and lower usage of the disposal system for waste producers farther away from the central facility.
Xie and Zilberman 2016,Xie, Yang, and David Zilberman. 2016. Theoretical implications of institutional, environmental, and technological changes for capacity choices of water projects. Water Resources and Economics 13: 19–29. 2017Xie, Yang, and David Zilberman. 2017. Water storage capacities versus water use efficiency: Substitutes or complements? Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. 2018. address whether two common approaches to tackling water scarcity, namely water use efficiency improvement and water storage capacity expansion, complement or substitute each other. These works explore theoretically counter-intuitive, practically relevant implications on infrastructure investment, consumption efficiency, and conservation of water and other resources.
Land use Collender and Zilberman (1985)Robert N. Collender, David Zilberman; Land Allocation under Uncertainty for Alternative Specifications of Return Distributions. Am J Agric Econ 1985; 67 (4): 779-786. derived a land allocation rule which is both independent of the nature of the underlying distribution of each element in the choice set and accounts for all moments of that distribution. This decision rule is applied to the choice between cotton and corn in the Mississippi Delta to demonstrate that consideration of just the first two moments of the distribution can often be unjustified and damaging empirically, theoretically, and in terms of the utility of the decision maker.
Pest management