If you are interested in working with me as a PhD student or PostDoc at ZEW, please send me an email.

Welcome to my personal website! 

My research focuses on the evaluation and design of economic policies to shape the transition to sustainable energy-economy systems and to mitigate climate change. For this, I use applied conceptual and numerical economic modelling drawing on environmental & energy & climate economics, public economics, applied microeconomics, and computational economics---with links to technology-focused energy research, energy systems analysis, and environmental sciences.

My work has appeared in general economics journals (e.g., Journal of Public Economics, American Economic Review P&P, European Economic Review), field journals (e.g., JEEM, ERE), and interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Nature Climate Change).

I am Head of the Research Department "Environmental and Climate Economics" at the ZEW-Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research and Full Professor of Environmental & Energy Economics in the Department of Economics (Alfred Weber-Institute) at Heidelberg University. I am also Co-Director of the Research Center for Environmental Economics (RCEE) at the Heidelberg University, a research associate at the Centre for Energy Policy and Economics at ETH Zurich, the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Mannheim Institute for Sustainable Energy Studies (MISES). I am also an elected member of the Standing Committee of Environmental and Resource Economists of the German Economic Association. 

Before joining ZEW and Heidelberg University, I was a professor at ETH Zurich and Director of the U.S. Regional Energy & Environment Modeling Project at MIT, after working as a Research Scientist and Postdoctoral Associate with the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and the MIT Energy Initiative in Cambridge, USA. I was educated at the University of Bonn, received a doctoral fellowship from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation, and obtained my Ph.D. in Economics from the Ruhr Graduate School in Economics and the University of Duisburg-Essen.

I've been ranked among the Top 100 Economists in the 2017 Handelsblatt ranking [#71 in the category "Current research output" and #37 in the category "Economists under the age of 40"]. I'm among the top 3% of economists in the worldwide RePEc ranking based on "Last 10 years of publications" and among the top 5% authors based on h-index. Link to my Google scholar profile. 

This page provides links to my research, publications, curriculum vitae, the ZEW research department in environmental and climate economics, and Heidelberg University.

Download current CV.

Contact details:

Prof. Dr. Sebastian Rausch

ZEW-Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

L7, 1

68161 Mannheim

sebastian.rausch(at)zew(dot)de