Valentin is a postdoctoral researcher on the SUSTAIN-COCOA project and with the Trase initiative. His research focuses on cocoa production in West Africa. He maintains data and models of cocoa supply chains, to map and assess the impacts of sustainability interventions therein. He has a special interest in causality and spillovers, which he primarily studies with spatial and reduced-form econometrics in quasi-experimental frameworks. Valentin received a training in economics in France and obtained his PhD in cotutelle from Université Paris Saclay and from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. During his doctoral studies, he was supervised by Raja Chakir at the Paris Saclay Applied Economics research unit, and by Sabine Fuss and Nicolas Koch at the Mercator Research Institute for Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC). Valentin has worked on the economics of palm oil deforestation in Indonesia and of pan-tropical indirect land use change, as well as on the food security effects of biofuel policy.