Welcome to my website!
I'm Konstantin Sommer, Economist at the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. I recently finished my PhD in Economics under the supervision of Franc Klaassen and Henri de Groot at the University of Amsterdam.
My research focuses on the intersection of environmental and international economics.
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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.
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.
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.
We study the implications of the Chinese waste import ban of 2018 on intra-European plastic waste trade. Specifically, we ask if it led to a ``waste haven'' effect, which would imply that countries with high disposal and recycling costs started to export more plastic waste to countries with lower costs. We study this question in a gravity difference-in-differences setting with detailed data on the costs of waste processing. We find strong evidence that countries with higher costs of disposal indeed started to export more waste towards lower cost countries as a result of this ban. We do not find consistent evidence that more waste was exported to countries with lower recycling costs. Our results raise distributional questions about the allocation of waste externalities in integrated markets and have implications for current debates on the legislation of international waste shipments.
