Welcome! I am a postdoctoral researcher at VATT Institute for Economic Research in Helsinki.
I obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of Cologne in 2026. 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”
Discussion Paper: ECONtribute
Morals and the Political Economy of Corrective 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 all other agents' emissions as given and socially responsible consumers who internalize some of the effects of emissions in a group-rule-utilitarian way: maximizing the welfare of all socially responsible consumers while taking only the behavior of neoclassical consumers as given. We characterize political equilibrium taxes and analyze how the disalignment of policy preferences between the two groups of agents can lead to deviations from efficient Pigouvian taxation and to increases in overall emissions. We also discuss how welfare can shrink further if moral arguments between the two groups become central to the debate. Finally, we report survey evidence consistent with our theory: social responsibility correlates with lower consumption of brown goods, higher preferred carbon taxes, and support for moral arguments.
Work in Progress
Risk Denial & Meritocracy (joint with Melisa Kurtis)
We argue that belief in meritocracy is linked to denial of risks hard work alone cannot overcome. In our model, present-biased individuals protect motivating beliefs: the more effort seems to pay, the more demotivating and worth forgetting is a threat effort cannot avert. Taxes and mitigation, chosen by vote under these beliefs, reinforce the complementarity. Two regimes emerge: meritocratic optimism and risk denial with low taxes and weak mitigation, or pessimistic beliefs and acknowledged risk with redistribution and mitigation. When a new risk becomes salient, inherited meritocracy beliefs select the regime. Empirical evidence is consistent with the mechanism.
Welfare Weights and the Social Cost of Carbon (joint with Felix Bierbrauer & Niklas Taft)
We use a simple model to study the interdependence of two policy design problems, an income tax problem and the design of a corrective tax. We clarify conditions under which corrective taxes vary along the Pareto-frontier. Under these conditions one needs to take stance on distributive issues to determine the social cost of carbon and the corresponding Pigouvian correction. We look at the problem both from a static and a dynamic perspective. There is a close correspondence between Pareto-efficient corrective taxes in the static model and the Pareto-efficient speed of the transition to a Carbon-neutral economy.
