Apply now for the PhD Economics Programm 2024!

Application for the PhD Economics Programm for the academic year 24/25 is possible now. WU is offering up to five PhD positions in Economics. For all details on the positions and how to apply please have a look at the job opening.

Application deadline is March 29th, 2024

June 2023:

Our PhD candidates Nikolas Kuschnig and Lukas Vashold co-authored the article "Eroding resilience of deforestation interventions – evidence from Brazil’s lost decade" in Environmental Research Letters (Open Access via doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acdfe7) with colleagues at the University of Oxford.

The paper assesses the erosion of deforestation interventions in Brazil, and how this lack of resilience impacts deforestation. Employing econometric methods and newly compiled data on environmental fines, they show that the enforcement of environmental policy has become ineffective in recent years. The impacts of this erosion are considerable – a hypothetical policy that doubles fines in 2020 (to 3,792) would lose out on 251,781 ha of prevented forest loss due to the drop in enforcement efficacy.

The authors conclude that, going forward, the resilience of policies should be considered for sustainable forest protection. Future efforts should be devoted to strengthening institutions, spreading responsibilities, and redistributing the common value of the Amazon via incentive-based systems – committing locals to its protection.

February 2023:

PhD candidate Philipp Poyntner co-authored the article "Quantitative Easing and Wealth Inequality: The asset price channel", which was recently published in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics (Open Acces via https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obes.12543). In the paper, the authors assess the impact of the ECB's quantitative easing (QE) on the distribution of household wealth in the euro area.

December 2022:

The World Data Lab (WDL) announced the launch of the World Emissions Clock (WEC) on the margins of the UN Climate Conference (COP27) in Egypt on November 18^th 2022. PhD candidate Lukas Vashold has played a leading role in the development of the statistical model and the data work behind the WEC.

In the scientific paper underlying parts of the WEC, Lukas Vashold and co-author Univ.Prof. Jesús Crespo Cuaresma develop a novel statistical methodology to project sectorally disaggregated greenhouse gas emissions, building on Bayesian econometric methods. Using this unified modelling framework, they derive business-as-usual projections of GHG emissions up to the year 2050 for most countries of the world and five sectors: energy production, transportation, industry, buildings, and agriculture. The probabilistic nature of their approach allows for straightforward uncertainty quantification, while also ensuring that the projections are coherent with medium and long-term forecasts of socioeconomic variables, as well as with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. The derived projections show that global GHG emissions are set to increase strongly in the next decades under business-as-usual, but also highlight a number of important differences across countries and sectors. The paper addresses the lack of comprehensive, sectorally disaggregated projections for GHG emissions and equips policy-makers with important information for the identification of sectors within countries critical for reducing future emissions.

Together with inputs from the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, the WEC provides an informative and user-friendly visualization platform that allows the user to understand the progress and possible challenges related to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under different hypothetical scenarios. It was developed in partnership with the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany (BMZ), the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), the Patrick McGovern Foundation, and the University of Oxford.

Links:

World Emissions Clock

WU press statement

July 2022:

PhD student Francesco Scarazzato together with co-authors Nicolas Koch, Nolan Ritter and Alexander Rohlf published a new paper titled "When is the electric vehicle market self-sustaining? Evidence from Norway"

This paper investigates whether the world’s most mature electric vehicle (EV) market in Norway has overcome critical mass constraints and can achieve sustainable long-term equilibria without subsidies. The authors estimate a structural model that allows for multiple equilibria emerging from the interdependence between EV demand and charging station supply. They first estimate the resulting indirect network effects using an instrumental variable approach. Then, they simulate long-term market outcomes for each of the 422 Norwegian municipalities. They find that almost 20% of all municipalities faced critical mass constraints in the earliest stage of the market. Half of them are effectively trapped in a zero-adoption equilibrium. However, in the maturing market, all municipalities have passed critical mass. Overall, about 60% of the Norwegian population now lives in municipalities with a high-adoption equilibrium, even if subsidies were removed. This suggests that critical mass constraints do no longer justify the provision of subsidies

When is the electric vehicle market self-sustaining? Evidence from Norway"