Grace Adeyemi works on how coastal economies respond to changes in the resources they depend on. A fishery closes, a species moves north, a port silts up: the economic consequence is rarely the one the model predicts, because the model assumes people can move between activities more easily than they can.
Her research on fishing communities has focused on adjustment costs — what it actually takes for a household to move out of a declining fishery, and why so many do not. The finding that has traveled furthest is that the barrier is more often licensing, debt and vessel capital than skills or willingness. That has direct implications for how transition programs are designed, and most are designed the other way.
She has a second line of work on valuation, and is unusually candid about its limits. Putting a number on a coastal wetland is useful in a cost-benefit process that will otherwise value it at zero. It is not the same as the number being right, and she argues the distinction matters more as the technique becomes more accepted.
Adeyemi teaches MPOL 540 Marine Resource Economics and contributes to MPOL 330 Fisheries Policy and Management. She directs the MS in Marine Resource Management.