Instructors

John Hassler (Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University) and Per Krusell (Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University)

Dates

2-6 September 2024

Hours

15:00 to 18:30 CEST

Format

In person

Intended for

Graduate students and researchers from academic and policy institutions.

Prerequisites

First-year graduate macroeconomics.

Overview

The course will cover the basic natural-science elements of climate change, "the climate system and the carbon cycle", as well as the literature on damage measurements. The main focus, however, will be on developing integrated assessment models (IAMs) aimed at evaluating national and global policies both regarding the use of fossil fuel and technical change.  These models are based on modern macroeconomic tools, i.e., they are dynamic general equilibrium models. They will be studied both in aggregate versions, i.e., modeling the world economy aggregates directly, and in disaggregated versions emphasizing a number of distributional aspects of climate change. The large uncertainty regarding both the sensitivity of climate to emissions and human welfare's sensitivity to climate change will be at the center of the policy analysis. The current reform of EU's climate policies, in particular the Fit-fir-55 package, will also be discussed.

Topics

• The natural science of climate change
• Climate damages
• Natural resource economics
• Directed technical change
• Good and bad climate policies with Fit-for-55 as an example

John Hassler is Professor of Economics at the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University. Professor Hassler obtained his PhD in Economics from MIT. He has been teaching subsequently at the Stockholm University. His research has covered areas of dynamic public finance, social mobility, growth, and climate change. He has been a long-serving member of the Prize Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He was the Chairman of the Swedish Fiscal Policy Council 2013-2016. He worked as advisor to the Swedish Ministry of Finance during the recent financial crisis when he was also a member of the European Economic Advisory Group. He has also been member of the Bellagio group of academics and central bankers.

Per Krusell is also Professor of Economics at the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University, as well as a Centennial Professor (part-time) at London School of Economics. He has also been Professor of Economics at a number of U.S. universities, most recently including Princeton University. As well as Hassler, he also served on the Economics Prize committee for many years. His research lies within macroeconomics, broadly speaking, and it has in particular focused on technical change and growth, inequality, policy determination, labor markets, and business cycle; currently he is conducting a long-term research project on global climate change in collaboration with natural scientists and with John Hassler and Tony Smith at Yale University.