Sebastian Rausch

Sebastian Rausch is a Professor of Economics at Heidelberg University and Head of the Research Department 'Environmental and Climate Economics' at the ZEW-Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research. He is also Co-Director of the Research Center for Environmental Economics (RCEE) at Heidelberg University and holds affiliations with the Centre for Energy Policy and Economics at ETH Zurich, the MIT Joint Program on Global Change, and the Mannheim Institute for Sustainable Energy Studies (MISES).

• Doctorate in Economics from Ruhr Graduate School and University of Duisburg-Essen
• Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation doctoral scholarship
• Co-Director of RCEE

His research focuses on evaluating and designing economic policies to address climate change, with emphasis on emissions markets, energy system transitions, and computational modeling at the intersection of environmental economics, public finance, and sustainable energy systems. He employs applied general equilibrium models and empirical methods to analyze policy impacts on households, firms, and intergenerational equity.

His recent publications in Journal of Public Economics, Nature Climate Change, and Energy Economics examine renewable energy support mechanisms, differentiated carbon pricing, and air quality co-benefits of climate policies. Key themes include market design for decarbonization, distributional effects of environmental taxes, and technology-specific policy instruments.

Scientific recognition includes:

• Doctoral scholarship from Alfried Krupp Foundation
• Handelsblatt 2017 Top 100 Economics ranking (within top 3% RePEc publications, top 5% h-index)
• Science prize for doctoral work

He leads interdisciplinary projects analyzing economic dividends from climate policy revenues and EU climate strategy design, with collaborations spanning MIT, ETH Zurich, and European policy institutions.