News
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.
February 2023:
Application for the PhD Economics Programm for the academic year 23/24 is possible now!
WU is offering up to five PhD positions in Economics, for all details on how to apply please have a look here. Application deadline is March 1st, 2023.
December 2022:
Our PhD Candidates Klara Kinnl and Ulrich Wohak were invited by the FEMM Committee of the European Parliament to present their research “Free the Period? Evaluating Tampon Tax Reforms using Transaction Based Scanner Data” at a Workshop on Menstrual Poverty.
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 18th 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:
September 2022:
Welcome to our new PhD Students! Three new PhD students joined us in the academic year 22/23. We are happy to welcome Lucas Konrad, Anne Valder and Lukas Pirnbacher (pictured left to right) to our PhD Economics Program.
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"