I am a postdoctoral researcher at the FutureLab CERES at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), working at the research department Climate Economics and Policy - MCC Berlin.
I work on different aspects of an architecture for improving global public good provision that is outlined here. The proposed architecture consists of two main components, reward funds incentivizing specific outcomes (e.g. low emissions) and policies (e.g. spending on certain types of disease surveillance) with positive global externalities and tax clubs that would generate funding for the reward funds.
With colleagues, we have developed a research agenda seeking to develop optimized versions for different components of the architecture and also for how they can best be combined. Several of these projects are sketched here. We are interested in collaborating with other researchers on these projects.
Some of the projects (indicated in the documents on reward funds and tax clubs ) have components that are suitable for highly motivated master students in economics, mathematics, computer science or related fields. Students interested in collaborating on these topics as their Master's thesis can reach me at lennart.stern[at]pik-potsdam.de.
If you are interested in contributing to the above research agenda and would like to join our team, you can apply here for a doctoral or postdoctoral position.
On the optimal design of jurisdictional reward funds:
Rewarding countries for taxing fossil fuel combustion: optimal mechanisms under exogenous budgets (with Matthias Kalkuhl)
Rewarding countries for having low emissions from oil: mechanism design with incentive-preserving baseline prediction
Jurisdictional Reward Funds for reducing fossil fuel demand and supply in global general equilibrium (with Matthias Kalkuhl)
Optimally rewarding countries for reducing fossil fuel supply and demand: a time consistency problem
Incentives for pathogen-agnostic disease surveillance via metagenomic sequencing
Deposit purchase based conservation in the presence of endogenous government tax policy
On tax club mechanisms to increase funding for jurisdictional reward funds and other funds for global public goods:
Aviation tax clubs: Evaluating proposals for mechanisms to raise revenue for global funds (with Matthias Kalkuhl)
Efficient aviation tax policy with endogenous vacancy rates (with Matthias Kalkuhl)
Proportionally matching voluntary contributions to Global Public Good Institutions
On Markov Perfect Equilibria in dynamic public goods games with randomly alternating contribution adjustment moves
The endogenous change in shipping speed when emissions from maritime shipping are taxed
Allowing for neutralizing contributions in mechanisms to allocate funding to projects with uncertain impacts: A remedy to the unilateralist curse?
On the design of domestic policy to address externalities:
Pareto-improving climate policy with heterogeneous abatement costs in the building sector , with Matthias Kalkuhl, Maximilian Kellner, Noah Kögel
Optimal subsidies for home delivery in times of COVID-19 (with Richard S. Gray)
On geoeconomics:
The Geopolitical Externality of Climate Policy (with T Beaufils, K. Conyngham, M. de Vries, M. Jakob, P. Richter, J. Wanner)