Sebastian Rausch

Prof. Dr. Sebastian Rausch is a Full Professor of Environmental and Energy Economics at Heidelberg University and Head of the Research Department 'Environmental and Climate Economics' at ZEW-Leibniz Centre. He co-directs the Research Center for Environmental Economics (RCEE) at Heidelberg and holds research associate roles at ETH Zurich's CEPE and MIT's Joint Program on Climate Science and Policy. His expertise spans environmental policy evaluation, emissions trading systems, and sustainable energy transitions. Rausch earned his PhD from the Ruhr Graduate School in Economics and has been recognized as a top economist globally. His research emphasizes quantifying policy impacts using computational models, with a focus on carbon pricing, renewable energy subsidies, and climate equity.

Education: MSc from University of Bonn, PhD (summa cum laude) from Ruhr Graduate School/University of Duisburg-Essen. Awards include the Alfried Krupp Foundation Doctoral Fellowship and Handelsblatt's Top 100 Economists (2017). Key affiliations include leadership roles in EU climate policy research and collaborations with international institutions like the MIT Joint Program.

Research projects include evaluating carbon tax effectiveness via machine learning, designing optimal renewable energy policies, and analyzing distributional impacts of EU carbon pricing harmonization. He also explores intergenerational equity in climate policy and the role of cross-border energy trade/storage in integrating renewables.