Research

My research interests are quite varied (hence the degrees in economics and philosophy), including areas such as Ecological (Macro)Economics, Comparative Political Economy and Varieties of Capitalism, Post-growth/degrowth, Labor Economics, Feminist Theory, or Philosophy of Economics. I’m driven by questions rather than by disciplinary boundaries, and most of these questions circle around the conditions, requirements and challenges of a socio-ecological transition in the face of climate breakdown.

Rather than trying to boil down my research to specific areas, I’d like to present some current research that is in various stages - I hope that this list will give a better idea of what I am currently working on and thinking through. If you are interested in any of these topics, I’m always happy to exchange thoughts!

For already published work, see my list of publications here.

List of current projects (all titles and contents are preliminary)

What’s wrong with the ‘grand gender convergence’? Gender wage gaps, care penalties and essential work in the United States

Although (White) women have increasingly shifted out of low-paid work over the past four decades in the US, female-coded work is still badly paid, despite often being essential. In this article, I use regression and descriptive methodologies to confirm prior literature on pay penalties for nurturant and reproductive care workers. Beyond the relative pay penalty, I show that care jobs are often bad in absolute terms, since a third of all care workers receive lousy wages, as do a quarter of essential care workers. Especially reproductive care jobs are compensated badly, with half of all essential workers in reproductive care receiving lousy wages. I trace changes in the demographic composition of the low-wage workforce, to show that is has become less White and less female over the past four decades. While this has partly driven greater gender equality, I argue greater gender justice only occurs once female-coded care work is recognized (and compensated) for its essential contribution to overall economic activity. A strategy of shifting this type of work to the bottom of the racial and gender division of labor not only fails to promote greater gender justice, but also deepens existing racial injustices. (PhD research, supervised by David Howell)

Carbon emissions, inequality and working hours: A US state-level analysis of the role of Veblen effects in labor supply and emissions

This article contributes to the literature on the link between inequality and emissions in a theoretical framework of social comparison-based utility related to labor supply. Specifically, I investigate potential Veblen effects mediating the relationship between top-end income inequality and carbon emissions via people’s labor supply decisions using US state level data from 1979-2018. I test two different hypotheses: firstly, that higher inequality leads to people working longer hours and secondly, that those longer hours are connected to increased carbon emissions. The results show positive and significant effects for both hypotheses, albeit effect sizes are rather small. While this paper does not argue that labor supply is the main channel through which top-end inequality impacts carbon emissions, it does conclude that labor supply is an important piece of the puzzle to understand this association. (PhD research, supervised by Till van Treeck)

The Sin of Omission in the Economics of Climate Change

In this paper, I argue that the discipline of economics is committing a sin of omission in its thinking about climate change. Picking up on the notion of ‘sin of omission’ by Akerlof (2020), I criticize the discipline’s narrow and one-dimensional focus, which is especially problematic when it comes to tackling climate change. In fact, the mainstream response to the climate emergency is deeply embedded in concepts such as utility-maximising and scarcity thinking, which leads to a framing of the climate emergency as a 'market failure', and the proposed solution of 'pricing externalities'. As I show in this paper, however, these very concepts are part and parcel of the history of climate change and its entanglement with the rise of capitalism. Addressing the climate emergency, thus, urgently needs tools that think about economic matters outside of the narrow confines of the economic mainstream. In this article, I show how heterodox contributions, especially from ecological and feminist approaches, offer both relevant critiques as well as relevant ways forward for tackling the climate crisis in ways beyond mere 'pricing externalities'. Not considering these perspectives in the discipline of economics, I argue, would constitute a 'sin of omission'.