Stefano Carattini is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Economic Policy Research and CESifo and an invited researcher at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
At Georgia State University, he directs the master's program in economics, which is currently ranked eleventh in the country. Before taking on this role, he was mostly involved with doctoral students, preparing them for the job market through "ECON 9510 Dissertation Workshop I." Throughout his career he has co-supervised many and coauthored with even more doctoral students, many of whom now hold academic positions.
His fields of interest are environmental economics, political economy, behavioral economics, and public economics.
He is interested in policy evaluation, examining 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 causally examining 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 and addressing scaling issues through Facebook ads and climate education). He is also interested in identifying potential origins of biased beliefs (including misinformation), which experience and (or) information can contribute to addressing. Further, he has studied the political economy of international coordination, in particular around global carbon pricing, including issues of within- and between-country inequalities, with a novel focus on public support for (international) carbon dividends.
He also studies the implications of the transition to a cleaner economy for workers, firms, as well as the economy more generally, 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 is otherwise invisible to the researcher. Theoretical models are also used when thinking about policies that are not yet in place.
Since 2015, he has raised more than $2 million in external funds, the majority of it as principal investigator (and sometimes sole investigator). Part of this research has been funded by private or public research organizations, such as the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
In his research, he has also collaborated with and, or, been funded by local and national governments such as the National Petroleum Authority and the National Premix Fuel Secretariat (Ghana), the Cantons of Geneva and Vaud and the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (Switzerland), UK Aid via Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries (United Kingdom), the cities of Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, and the Department of Energy (United States). He has also consulted for the World Bank on the political economy of fossil fuel subsidy reforms and served as discussant for the International Monetary Fund's Fiscal Monitor on climate change. He has presented his research in policy circles on numerous occasions, including for the Delegation of the European Union to the United States (European Union), France Stratégie (France), the German Council of Economic Experts (Germany), Auckland Council, the Ministry of Transport, New Zealand Infrastructure Commission Te Waihanga, and Wellington City Council (New Zealand), the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (United Kingdom). His research has been drawn on in official reports and policy documents by numerous national governments, United Nations agencies, development banks, and other multilateral organizations.
His research is also relevant to central banks and has been funded by the South African Reserve Bank (South Africa) and the International Network for Sustainable Financial Policy Insights, Research, and Exchange (INSPIRE). He has presented his research for Banco de Portugal, the Bank of England, the Bank of France, the Bank of Spain, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the South African Reserve Bank, and the South East Asian Central Banks Research and Training Centre.
His research has been covered in media outlets such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany); Il Fatto 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.
His research has been cited more than 5,000 times to date. 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, presented 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 an MSc in Economics from the University of Lausanne. He also holds a BA in Socio-economics from the University of Geneva.