Jonathan Leisner defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Economics

Candidate

Jonathan Leisner, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

Title

Essays in Environ mental Economics: Technology, Trade and the Labour Market

Supervisors

Professor Jakob Roland Munch
Professor Peter Birch Sørensen

Assessment Committee

  • Professor Bertel Schjerning Department of Economics
  • Associate Professor Joel Rodrigue Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University
  • Associate Professor Jevan Cherniwchan Carleton University, Department of Economics

Summary

The dissertation consists of four self-contained chapters that answer research questions within the field of environmental economics, and more specifically, climate change economics. As the title of the thesis suggests, the research questions are quite distinct  Chapter one is purely methodological, chapter two and three are purely empirical and chapter four is somewhere in-between. They all have a common goal however: Provide answers to questions that are policy relevant within the sphere of climate change economics. The breadth of the questions is mirrored in the breadth of the methods applied: The first chapter develops a method for incorporating engineering data on technologies in computable general equilibrium models. The second chapter uses instrumental variables regressions from the international trade literature to estimate causal effects using firmlevel micro data. The third chapter presents descriptive statistics on emissions, firms and workers across seven European countries. Finally, the fourth chapter extends a dynamic discrete choice general equilibrium model, performs a structural estimation using linked worker-firm data and simulates a counterfactual policy experiment where a sector-specific greenhouse gas tax gradually increases.

En elektronisk kopi af afhandlingen kan rekvireres her: Pia.Vestergaard@econ.ku.dk