ISTP News

Our next colloquium talk will take place online on Tuesday, 13th October 2020, at 5pm. The invited guest speaker, Dr. Bjarne Steffen will talk about the role of finance in climate policy. Mitigating dangerous climate change requires a rapid transition of economies towards low-carbon technologies. Bjarne Steffen will elaborate on the interplay between interest rates and the politics of emissions trading.

Whether voluntary environmental action pays off for both business and the environment has been a subject of academic and policy debate for many decades. A recent study by CIS & ISTP PhD Student Dennis Kolcava, ETH Prof. Thomas Bernauer, and NMBU & UZH Prof. Joachim Scholderer reveals that citizens are more willing to reward firms with public procurement contracts, tax breaks and lenient regulatory enforcement when these firms engage in ambitious voluntary environmental action.

The IMF is worried because of many states' increasing indebtedness, and talks of new risks in the world economy, ten years after the 2008 financial crisis. As a trade expert, Thomas Bernauer is analyzing the current situation from an economic as well as political perspective on the Swiss Public Radio (SRF 4).