Yaya Sissoko
Yaya Sissoko has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Garvin-Kort Faculty Award for Research in Economics. Generous donations from 1981 IUP Distinguished Alumni Award recipient John Kort ’74 and the late Alexander Garvin, economics faculty 1969–98, provide support for faculty research.
Sissoko gratefully accepted this award and will use the funds to support his research titled “Resilience in African Agricultural Systems: Adapting to a Changing Climate” and “Do Trees Matter for Sovereign Risk? Evidence from West Africa” for a presentation (podium and/or poster) at the 2027 AEA/ASSA Meetings in Washington, DC.
Sissoko’s recent research projects have culminated in the following publications:
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Boubacar, Inoussa, and Sissoko, Yaya. (2025) “Sustainable Forest Management through Certification and Wood Products Trade: Analyzing the Role of the FSC across Diverse Economic and Climatic Contexts,” Journal of Cleaner Production, 518, 145786, Sustainable forest management through certification and wood products trade: Analyzing the role of the FSC across diverse economic and climatic contexts - ScienceDirect
We examine the role of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification in advancing sustainable forest management and influencing forest cover changes across 70 countries from 2000 to 2021. Our analysis suggests that FSC certification significantly enhances forest cover, with the most pronounced effects observed in low-and middle-income countries. Our findings highlight the importance of market-based conservation tools, such as FSC certification, which align economic incentives with sustainability objectives.
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Forrest, Jeffrey Y., Köse, Erkan, Wajda, Theresa A., Guo, Jin-Li, Sissoko, Yaya, and Shao, Alan T. (2025) “Several Remarks on Consumer Preferences That Are Neither Complete Nor Transitive,” Journal of Business, Economics and Technology, 28(1).
Our analysis employs Euclidean space ℝℓ as its playground, as what was initially done in Debreu (1959), to revisit a few previously known results of the consumer theory established on the unrealistic assumption that each consumer can completely preorder his set of all consumption possibilities (Levin & Milgrom, 2004; Mas-Colell et al., 1995). Other than our theoretical contributions, including how a consumer’s set of all possible consumptions can be characteristically represented and how his preference relation can have real-valued utility representation, our analysis is also a small part of a much larger effort of developing a new consumer theory so that the new theory can be employed to produce more tangible practical values than the current, prevalent theory can.
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Sloboda, Brian, and Sissoko, Yaya. (2024). “Effects of Public Capital Investments on the Productivity of the United States, 1992-2022”, Book Chapter for the book entitled, “Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Methods for Maximizing Efficiency”, The IGI Global Publisher.
This chapter examines the productivity of the public sectors throughout the United States from 1992 through 2022. Because there is heterogeneity across states regarding public services provided, this could impact its productivity and efficiency. The services provided by the public sector have come under increased scrutiny with the ongoing reform process in recent years. In the public sector, unlike the private sector, the information and incentives provided by these markets and performance information (particularly comparative performance measures) have been used to gauge the productivity of the public service sector. This chapter examines the productivity of the public sector across states using the standard data envelopment analysis (DEA) and efficiency measures given by the Malmquist productivity index. Then, the DEA analysis was followed by panel regression analysis.
Past recipients of the Garvin-Kort Faculty Award for Research in Economics include active IUP Department of Finance and Economics faculty members Brandon Vick, James Jozefowicz, and David Yerger.