Konstantin Sommer
Welcome to my website!
I'm Konstantin Sommer, PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Amsterdam.
My research focuses on the intersection of environmental and international economics.
My supervisors are Franc Klaassen and Henri de Groot (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).
Between January and June 2023,
I was working in the Trade and International Integration Research Program of the World Bank in Washington DC.
Contact:
- E-Mail: k.h.l.sommer2"at"uva.nl
- Linkedin: Konstantin Sommer
My Research
The effects of market integration on pollution: an analysis of EU enlargements
We study the effects of market integration on manufacturing emission intensities of CO2, SOx, and NOx. For this, we analyse the 2004 and 2007 EU enlargements in a sectoral panel with data on almost all EU member states from 1995 to 2015. We pay close attention to relevant channels of trade, regulation, and efficiency. Overall, the enlargements have resulted in a reduction of emission intensities in new member states: new regulations, which accession countries needed to adopt, have lowered pollution intensities strongly; induced improvements in productivity have further reduced them; and trade integration into the EU has had insignificant effects on emission intensities. We also do not find evidence of within-EU pollution haven effects and thus of leakage from old to new member states. For old members, trade integration, if anything, increased emission intensities, but efficiency improvements have also contributed to cleaner manufacturing sectors here.
Economic performance and investments under emissions trading: untangling the effects of a staggered regulation
We study the effects of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) on economic performance and investments of Dutch manufacturing firms. Motivated both by sizable differences between firms that are regulated in different phases and by a gradual increase in regulatory stringency, we pay close attention to treatment effect heterogeneity between firms and over time. We use microdata from Statistics Netherlands to show how using a two way fixed effect estimator in such a staggered difference-in-differences setting could lead biased results and then use more recent econometric techniques to capture the ETS's treatment effect. We find no effects of the ETS on investment behavior and profitability, but sizable negative effects on the turnover of firms that were regulated the earliest and were the most energy-intense.
Trade, Outsourcing, and the Environment
This paper analyzes the effects of carbon taxation and border carbon adjustments in a setting where firms can choose to respond to taxation by abating or by outsourcing part of their production. For this, this paper sets up a general equilibrium trade model, calibrated with world trade and input-output data that features a discrete choice production structure, where the producers choose between outsourcing or abating emission-intensive intermediate production steps. The paper finds that border adjustments that cannot target scope 3 emissions can lead to outsourcing, and thus leakage, further down the value chain, but nevertheless induce higher abatement both in the countries that impose the border adjustment and in the ones affected by it.
Project title
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