Climate Economics

Open Meeting 2021 on All Economic Topics

Call for papers: February 1 - March 1, 2021

The Annual Conference of the Verein fuer Socialpolitik consists of an Open Meeting with mixed topics and of a core conference with invited lectures concerning “Climate Economics”. Presentations and Organised Sessions for the Open Meeting may be submitted from all fields of economics.

The submissions are evaluated by anonymous referees and subsequently selected by the Programme Committee.

Programme Committee of the Open Meeting (Chair: Almuth Scholl, University of Konstanz)

Anke Gerber (University of Hamburg)
Hendrik Hakenes (Universit of Bonn)
Philipp Harms (Universit of Mainz)
Leo Kaas (University of Frankfurt)
Michael Kvasnicka (University of Magdeburg)
Dominika Langenmayr (University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)
Sarah Lein (University of  Basel)
Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch (University of Düsseldorf)
Philipp Schmidt-Dengler (University of Vienna)
Carsten Trenkler (University of Mannheim)

With approval during the submission process, accepted contributions will be published in EconStor, the online publication database of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Center Economy which is a part of the collection of all VfS conference contributions. Further publication is not intended by the Verein fuer Socialpolitik.

EconStor (www.econstor.eu) is a disciplinary publication server for the distribution of economics research papers in Open Access. It is maintained by the ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. Making your conference paper on EconStor as a pre-publication available, increases the visibility of your research (e.g. via RePEc) and does not conflict with the submission to a scholarly journal. If necessary, papers on EconStor can be withdrawn and deleted at any time. Further information here. 

Core Conference 2021: Climate Economics

Global climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Slowing down climate change and adapting to its inevitable consequences will require enormous investments into new technologies and infrastructures for many decades to come. At the political level, effective climate policy requires collective action by sovereign states and a fair distribution of the costs among countries with very different levels of economic development. This year’s core conference highlights that economics is essential for understanding these problems as well as for analyzing and evaluating possible solutions.

Three keynotes by leading international scholars will give an overview of current economic research on climate policy design. William Nordhaus (Yale University) was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis. He will talk about the failed architecture of current international agreements and present alternative designs. Much of the growth in future energy consumption is projected to come from non-OECD countries. Catherine Wolfram (University of California at Berkeley) will explain how technologies and policies designed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions will work in the context of the energy systems in these markets. Complementary to reducing emissions are policies that regulate the extraction of fossil fuels and protect natural carbon sinks. Bård Harstad (University of Oslo) will argue that such supply-side policies have many advantages and, if designed optimally, can help to conserve tropical forests as well as coal.

A panel discussion with politicians, researchers, and stakeholders will focus on the economic implications of climate neutrality objectives stipulated in the European Green Deal.