Stefano Carattini is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.
His fields of interest are environmental economics, political economy, behavioral economics, and public economics.
He is interested in policy evaluation, to examine how policies work, as well as their political economy, in particular people's understanding of and support for (ex-ante) unpopular policies that experts generally consider socially desirable. His research in this space aims at generating new evidence while also providing methodological innovations, such as by examining causally the role of direct experience with policies (causal analysis of public support) and by advancing the study of information provision in surveys (starting in 2015), with the integration of computable general equilibrium models, and in field experiments (starting in 2018), addressing scaling issues through Facebook ads or climate education. He is also interested in identifying potential sources of biased beliefs, which experience and (or) information can contribute to address.
He also studies the implications of the transition to a cleaner economy for workers, firms, as well as the economy more in general, including questions of asset stranding and systemic risk.
His research also examines the diffusion of pro-environmental and pro-social behaviors, practices, and technologies and the role of cooperation in local and global social dilemmas at large.
His research combines applied microeconometric techniques for observational studies and, when causal identification in the current state of the world is not possible, field experiments. His research also relies on surveys to uncover what is on people's minds and otherwise invisible to the researcher. Theoretical models are also used when thinking about policies that are not yet in place.
Since 2015, he raised about $2 million in external funds, the majority of which as the principal investigator (and sometimes sole investigator). His research has been covered in media outlets such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany); Il Foglio Quotidiano, La Stampa, and Rai Radio 3 (Italy), Le Temps, RTS, and Tages-Anzeiger (Switzerland), The Daily Mail and The Guardian (United Kingdom), and the Houston Chronicle, MarketWatch, and WIRED (United States), among many others. According to IDEAS RePEc he is one of the top young economists, top environmental economists across all cohorts, and top 10% of economists across all cohorts and fields. He is also one of the recipients of the Heinz König Young Scholar Award, delivered by the Mannheim Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW).
Prior to joining Georgia State, he was an Associate Research Scientist at Yale University, where he was also a Lecturer in the School of Public Health. He obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of Barcelona and a MSc in Economics from the University of Lausanne. He also holds a BA in Socio-economics from the University of Geneva.