Rate My Professor Pia Nilsson

University of Helsinki

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5.05/4/2026

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About Pia

Pia Nilsson is Professor of Agricultural Economics in the Department of Economics and Management at the University of Helsinki. She earned her PhD in Economics from Jönköping University, defending her doctoral thesis titled 'Price Formation in Real Estate Markets' on 22 March 2013. She was awarded the title of Docent in Economics by Jönköping University on 17 January 2019 and by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) on 11 June 2020. Previously, she served as Senior Lecturer or Associate Professor in Economics at SLU. Since 2024, she holds a position as Researcher at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) in Stockholm. Nilsson was appointed to her professorship at the University of Helsinki by the rector, as proposed by the Faculty.

Her research specializations encompass firm productivity, structural transformation, knowledge diffusion, human capital, technology adoption, and intergenerational renewal in agriculture. She examines how farm productivity responds to climatic extremes, such as drought, and how adaptive strategies like functional crop diversification improve resilience, input self-sufficiency, and economic performance under increasing weather variability. Her studies also analyze intergenerational ownership transitions, including the effects of institutional factors like inheritance and gift taxation on the timing, form, investment decisions, productivity, and long-term behavior in agriculture. Nilsson teaches courses such as Production Economics (YET-211), Production and Cost Theory (AGERE-A05), and Principles of Agricultural Economics (YET-008, Maatalousekonomian perusteet). She supervises doctoral theses, serves as custos and grading committee member, for example, for Susanna Lahnamäki-Kivelä (2026) and Sara Zaman (2025), and as supervisor for Eleanor Johansson's doctoral thesis (2026).

Key publications include 'The impact of drought on farm economic performance: evidence from Sweden' (2025, Empirical Economics, with S. Mellon Bedi and H. Hansson), 'Transition dynamics of hybrid farmers: a survival analysis of exits and entries into full-time farming' (2024, European Review of Agricultural Economics, with E. Johansson and H. Hansson), 'Farm performance and input self-sufficiency increases with functional crop diversity on Swedish farms' (2023, Ecological Economics, with P. Bommarco, H. Hansson, B. Kuns, and H. Schaak), 'Long-term trends in functional crop diversity across Swedish farms' (2023, Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, with H. Schaak, R. Bommarco, H. Hansson, B. Kuns), 'The role of collaboration and external knowledge for innovation in small food firms' (2023, Annals of Regional Science, with S. Wixe, L. Naldi, H. Westlund), and 'The role of land use consolidation in improving crop yields among smallholders—Evidence from Rwanda' (2019). Her research contributes to agricultural economics, with over 1,700 citations on Google Scholar.