Welcome! I am a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Cologne.
My research is on the intersection of innovation, behavioral, environmental and public economics.
I am affiliated with ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy - the cluster of excellence at the Universities Bonn and Cologne, and the Center for Social and Economic Behavior (C-SEB).
I will be on the 2025/26 Job Market.
Email: ritterrath[at]wiso.uni-koeln.de
University of Cologne, ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy,
SSC Building, Room 3.318,
Universitätsstraße 22a, 50937 Cologne - Germany
Job Market Paper
Inventors’ Personal Experience of Natural Disasters and Green Innovation (joint with Lisa Keding)
We show that personal experiences affect high-stakes economic decisions among inventors. Using matched patent and survey data from French and German inventors linked to natural disaster records, we exploit exogenous variation in disaster exposure. Inventors personally affected by natural disasters subsequently produce 8.2% more green patents, primarily driven by emission-reducing mitigation technologies, while non-green innovation remains unaffected. The absence of sizable spatial spillovers highlights the importance of personal experience. Disaster exposure shapes innovation choices by altering profitability expectations through shifting higher-order beliefs about consumer demand and anticipated regulation. Embedding this channel in a formal model, we disentangle the role of expectations and intrinsic motivation. The model predicts, and the data confirm, that effects are strongest in competitive markets, where profit incentives matter most.
2024 Best Paper Award - Ivey-ARCS PhD Sustainability Academy
2025 YEP Doctoral Paper Award - ECONtribute (Universities Bonn & Cologne)
This paper supersedes an earlier version that was circulated under the title ”The Effects of Natural Disasters on Green Innovation”
Work in Progress
Risk Denial & Meritocracy (joint with Melisa Kurtis) - pilot data collected
This paper investigates whether individuals with strong meritocratic beliefs rationally downplay existential threats such as climate change, war, or civil unrest to sustain their motivation to exert effort. We develop a theoretical model linking meritocratic beliefs to risk denial and empirically test its implications using survey data. We find that individuals who more strongly endorse meritocracy are significantly more likely to discount future existential risks, particularly those related to climate change and geopolitical conflict. To identify causality, we propose a controlled laboratory experiment designed to explicitly test whether stronger beliefs in the returns to effort induce individuals to deny existential threats as a strategy to maintain motivation.
On the Equity-Efficiency-Tradeoff and the Social Cost of Carbon (joint with Felix Bierbrauer & Niklas Taft)
While economists widely recognize carbon pricing as a first-best solution to mitigate emissions, the optimal level of such a policy is subject to societal judgments regarding welfare and equity. We show that along the Pareto frontier the optimal carbon price declines as more welfare weight is placed on agents who derive higher utility from polluting consumption. This price is uniform across agents, taking the form of a Pigouvian tax that internalizes the welfare-weighted externality, even though its level changes along the frontier. This highlights that carbon pricing must balance efficiency with societal preferences over equity, making its design inherently a matter of normative choice.
Standard Economic Agents, Socially Responsible Consumers and the Political Economy of Climate Policy (joint with Felix Bierbrauer, Mattias Polborn and Georg Weizsäcker)
We examine how the aggregation of heterogeneous preferences affects climate policy outcomes. Using a political economy model, we compare two types of agents: standard economic agents, who respond only to price signals, and ethical agents, who respond to both prices and perceived environmental damages. Ethical agents alone would voluntarily internalize environmental externalities, achieving Pigouvian outcomes without taxes, whereas standard agents set a Pigouvian tax. In a mixed-agent society, ethical agents advocate for a Pigouvian tax to correct externalities, while standard agents now resist the tax due to facing higher costs than ethical agents. Ethical motives among some agents can paradoxically reduce support for efficient environmental policies among others, due to cultural divides and distributive conflicts. To empirically explore these dynamics, we develop a survey measuring the distribution and behavior of these agents within society.