Welcome to my personal website
I am a Climate and Environmental Economist and currently hold the Einstein International Postdoctoral Fellowship financed by the Einstein Foundation in Berlin. I have obtained a DPhil (PhD) in the field of Climate Econometrics from the University of Oxford and am currently based at the Faculty of Economics and Management at TU Berlin and the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK) as well as the Climate Econometrics research group at the University of Oxford.
In my research, I make ample use of econometric time series and panel methods to study climate change and how to address it. My research focuses on quantifying the effects of climate policies on emission trajectories using methods from the macro-econometrics as well as the causal inference literature. This includes efforts to study which policies can be the most effective at reducing emissions. I use similar methods to create forecasting models of the energy system (e.g. the Open-Source Empirical Macro Model) and have published on the economic impacts of climate change as well as on Just Transition aspects of the Clean Energy Transition.
I contribute to the development of open-source estimation software to disseminate the methods and techniques we develop, such as the {gets} R-package (general to specific modelling techniques, indicator saturation, and model selection, see also website here) and the {getspanel} R-package (gets-type techniques for panels and causal inference, see also website here). More recently, I have been developing the Open Source Empirical Macro Model (OSEM) as well as the associated R package {osem} together with co-authors.
During my DPhil studies, I was based at the School of Geography and Environment. I remain associated with the Climate Econometrics project at Nuffield College as well as with the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
As a Clarendon Scholar, my DPhil was supported by the Clarendon Fund, while my research was supervised by Prof Sir David F Hendry and Prof Cameron Hepburn.
Newest Research:
Science: Identifying successful climate policies
As part of an international research team, we have published the first global assessment of climate policies in the four most critical emission sectors in the journal Science.
We unveiled the first comprehensive global evaluation of 1,500 climate policy measures from 41 countries across six continents. We identified ‘emission breaks’ and assigned them policy interventions, pinpointing where policies may have had a large impact. The break detection methodology, called indicator saturation estimation, developed at Climate Econometrics, allows break indicators for all possible dates to be examined objectively using a variant of machine learning. This unprecedented study provides a detailed impact analysis of the wide range of climate policy measures implemented across the planet over the last two decades.
We have identified 63 cases of successful climate policies with large emission reductions with the key characteristic of these successful cases being the inclusion of tax and price incentives in well-designed policy mixes. Our study also shows that if more countries relied on policies like these ones, the remaining emissions gap for 2030 could be closed by as much as 26% to 41%. The identified successful policies have led to an average emission reduction of 19 percent. In total, the 63 policy interventions reduced emissions between 0.6 and 1.8 billion tonnes of CO2.
For more detail on the identified policies, check out our Climate Policy Exporer where you can dive deeper into our results and findings.
[Data and code][Interactive web dashboard]\
Media: [New York Times][Financial Times][Wall Street Journal][Washington Post][NewScientist][Associated Press][CNN][CBC][The Economist][The Times][El Mundo][Le Monde][L’Express][France Culture][ORF][Der Standard][Spiegel][Zeit][FAZ][SZ][zdf][Deutschlandfunk][Nature News]
Energy Policy: Labour Market Impacts of Coal Mine Closures
We have recently published a paper in Energy Policy that considers the dynamics of the US labour market that are associated with coal mines closing. The paper finds that coal mine closures raise US county unemployment rates with spatial ripple effects and that Just Transition interventions should tailor to local conditions to alleviate impacts.
You can find my full publication list here.