[Spin City: Local Externalities of Wind Turbines] with Sven Heim and Mario Liebensteiner · Energy Economics, 2026

Wind turbines are central to the energy transition, yet their deployment generates significant local externalities that fuel community opposition and project delays. Using quasi-experimental variation in turbine placement, we find that installations decrease house purchase prices by an average of 1.9% in affected municipalities, with the largest effects for the first turbines in a given area. Wind turbines also reduce local tourism activity and depress building permits for residential construction. On the positive side, each installation raises a municipality's local tax capacity by 1.8% through higher commercial tax revenues.

[The Impact of Electricity Market Integration on the Cost of CO₂ Emissions Abatement through Renewable Energy Promotion]

Revision requested at The Energy Journal, resubmitted · 2nd prize, FAERE Young Economist Award 2024

Renewable energy subsidies are widely used to reduce CO₂ emissions, but their environmental effectiveness depends on which technology they displace at the margin. This paper studies how electricity market integration across borders affects the marginal abatement cost of renewable energy promotion. Using variation in cross-border interconnection capacity between Spain and France, I show that market integration generates regional heterogeneity in the CO₂ abatement effect of renewables, with implications for the design and geographic targeting of renewable energy support schemes.

[How Fuel Switching Impacts the Environmental Value of Renewable Energy]

Revision requested at Economics of Energy and Environmental Policy

The environmental value of renewable energy depends on which fossil fuel technology operates at the margin of the electricity system. At low carbon prices, renewables displace gas generation, yielding modest emission reductions. As carbon prices rise, coal becomes the marginal technology and the environmental value of renewables increases. Beyond a threshold where coal exits entirely, gas returns to the margin and the environmental value falls again. These results imply that renewable subsidies should be differentiated across regions and time periods to reflect the changing identity of the marginal emitter.

[When Wind Blows Through the Backdoor: Revisiting IV Estimates of Household Elasticities under Real-Time Electricity Pricing During the Energy Crisis] with Henri Herrmann and Oliver Ruhnau · CESifo Working Paper No. 12617, 2026

We reassess instrumental variable estimates of household electricity demand elasticities under real-time pricing using Finnish smart-meter data. Standard approaches instrument electricity prices with wind output, but we show that local wind conditions directly shift electricity consumption through heating-related channels in homes with electric heating, violating the exclusion restriction. Controlling for hourly local wind speeds substantially reduces estimated IV price coefficients. We find elasticities of −0.020 before the energy crisis and −0.041 during it, and show that a 1 m/s increase in local wind speed raises hourly consumption by about 1%, equivalent to a price effect of 25–30 €/MWh.

When a Carbon Tax Backfires: Cross-Border Externalities of Environmental Policy · with Guillaume Wald