Koch, Nicolas

Dr. Nicolas Koch is Head of the "Policy Evaluation Lab" at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). He is also a Research Fellow at IZA and RWI. His core expertise is the empirical assessment of climate policies using rigorous methodologies for causal impact evaluation.

Nicolas is an environmental economist drawing from the fields of urban and transportation economics, health economics, and applied microeconomics in general. His research combines methodologies for causal impact and welfare analysis with the power of big data to improve public policy making on pressing environmental policy challenges. His scholarly interests range widely in topics. Specific areas in which he conducted research include the effectiveness of climate policy instruments (and carbon pricing, in particular), the social costs of air pollution, environmental challenges from road transportation, the distributional impacts of various environmental policies, and the benefits of forest conservation policies. His work has been published, amongst others, in AEJ: Economic Policy, Science, PNAS, Nature Climate Change, Nature Energy, JAERE, JEEM, and JUE. He is Principle Investigator on “Climate Policy for Transport” in the BMBF-funded Kopernikus-Projekt Ariadne, Germany’s largest social science Energiewende research project.

Nicolas received his PhD in Economics from the University of Hamburg in 2013.  He has been a visiting scholar at the University of East Anglia, and a visiting lecturer at BEM Bordeaux Management School.