Eyal Frank, an EPIC scholar and assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, has won the 2026 Erik Kempe Award in Environmental and Resource Economics, alongside co-author Anant Sudarshan. They received the award, which recognizes the best paper in the field of environmental and resource economics, for their paper “The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence from the Decline of Vultures in India.”
Presented by the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE), the prize was announced at the World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists on July 1, 2026.
The winning study, published in American Economic Review in 2024, examined the impact of the collapse of India’s vulture population on human mortality. The authors estimated that, between 2000 and 2005, the loss of vultures caused about 100,000 additional human deaths each year, resulting in $69.4 billion per year in mortality damages. Their results suggested high returns to conserving keystone species such as vultures.
“Eyal Frank and Anant Sudarshan receive the Erik Kempe Award for an insightful contribution to the measurement of [the] value of ecosystem services which, in turn, is essential for cost-benefit analysis of conservation policy,” said the EAERE prize committee. “By recovering the mechanisms underlying species collapse, the results may inform efforts to recover [the] vulture in India, and more broadly show how local population extinction can be used to analyze the effects of species extinction on human well-being.”
EAERE also said that Frank and Sudarshan “contributed substantially” to both academic research on species collapse and conservation policy.
“I’m honored by this recognition of our research from the EAERE, a global leader in environmental economics,” said Frank. “I’m excited to continue investigating the world’s toughest questions in ecology and policy with the support of EPIC and the international research community.”
The study represents a line of Frank’s research that estimates the social cost of biodiversity losses. Other work in this line of research includes “Campaigning for Extinction: Eradication of Sparrows and the Great Famine in China” and “The Economic Impacts of Ecosystem Disruptions: Costs from Substituting Biological Pest Control.”