Welcome! I am a postdoctoral researcher at VATT Institute for Economic Research in Helsinki and a PhD candidate 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).
Working Papers
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 patent and survey data from French and German inventors linked to natural disaster records, we exploit exogenous variation in disaster exposure. Inventors who experience natural disasters produce 8.1\% more green patents, mainly emission-reducing mitigation technologies, while non-green innovation remains unaffected. The absence of sizable spatial spillovers highlights the importance of personal experience. Disasters shape innovation by altering profitability expectations through shifting higher-order beliefs about consumer demand and anticipated regulation. Our 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
Morals and the Political Economy of Carbon Taxes (joint with Felix Bierbrauer, Mattias Polborn and Georg Weizsäcker)
We study the political economy of carbon taxes in a model with neoclassical consumers who take prices and country-wide emissions as given and socially responsible consumers who internalize the effects of their actions on others. In equilibrium, the interaction of the two types can create a political tragedy of the commons: a larger share of socially responsible consumers implies a decrease in taxes and an increase of overall emissions. We also analyze how equilibria change if moral arguments take a more central role in societal discourse. Finally, we report on a survey that investigates how preferences over carbon taxes vary with consumption behavior and attitudes towards social responsibility.
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)
The key insight of this paper is that optimal carbon prices depend on society's welfare preferences. We characterize the Pareto frontier of optimal corrective taxation under the Atkinson-Stiglitz separability conditions in a model with green and brown goods. The carbon price takes the Pigouvian form at every point along the frontier and is uniform across types, but its level varies with welfare weights. Heterogeneous environmental preferences give the corrective tax a distributive role even in the separable case, contrary to the standard result that commodity taxes follow first-best principles independent of redistributive concerns. Extending the framework to a dynamic setting, we show that the same logic governs the timing of the green transition: the optimal switching time from brown to green production varies along the Pareto frontier, with planners who favor the environmentally less-concerned type delaying the transition. Existing social cost of carbon estimates are therefore implicitly conditioned on a distributional choice that is never made explicit.
