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
Standard Economic Agents, Socially Responsible Consumers and the Political Economy of Climate Policy (joint with Felix Bierbrauer, Mattias Polborn and Georg Weizsäcker)
We study how ethical differences and moral activism shape the political economy of carbon taxation. We develop a model with two types of voters: standard agents, who are price takers, take aggregate emissions as given, and base consumption solely on the tax-inclusive price of the dirty good; and ethical consumers, modeled as rule-utilitarians, who voluntarily internalize part of the environmental externality. We characterize both groups’ preferences over carbon taxes and show that a median voter theorem applies. In homogeneous societies, externalities are addressed efficiently, either through Pigouvian taxation or through ethical self-restraint. In mixed populations, a political tragedy of the commons can arise. When the median voter is a standard economic agent, the presence of socially responsible consumers who also derive less benefit from dirty consumption or perceive larger aggregate climate damages can lower equilibrium support for carbon taxation. We then introduce moral activism. Shaming that raises the social cost of dirty consumption can increase standard agents’ support for carbon taxes by making brown consumption less attractive. However, if some standard agents can strategically refute shaming, moral activism can backfire, lowering equilibrium taxes and generating Pareto-inferior outcomes.
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.
