PRFDHR Seminar: The Political Economics of Green Transitions, Professor Torsten Persson

Reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases may be almost impossible without a green transition - a process of radically changing consumption and production patterns. Professor Torsten Persson and his co-author Professor Timothy Besley, put forward a model where switches in consumption and production create a dynamic complementarity that can help or hinder a green transition. In democratic societies, governments cannot commit to future policy paths and must aggregate conflicting interests across different voters. Moreover, democratic politics include a range of informal activities, firm lobbying, as well as activist protests against brown firms (or promotions of green firms).
These different aspects of politics constrain feasible policies. They ask whether, and under what circumstances, the interaction of political forces and market forces bring about a green transition.
TORSTEN PERSSON is a Swedish Research Council Distinguished Professor at Stockholm
University, a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and has held visiting
positions at leading universities as Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley. He was President of the
Econometric Society in 2008, and President of the European Economic Association in 2003.
Persson’s scientific prizes include the 1997 Yrjö Jahnsson Medal, given biannually to “the
best young economist in Europe”, and the 2018 CES-Ifo Prize. His work spans different areas
of economics and its intersections with other fields of social science. Persson is most well-known
for his articles and books on political economics, and his current research in this field
focuses on the selection of politicians, and on the interactions between culture and
institutions. He has also been deeply engaged in the policy process at different points in time,
most recently as a member of the Swedish Corona Commission – in that context, Persson has
started up a broad multidisciplinary research program on the causes and consequences of the
pandemic.
Co-sponsored by the Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses (PRFDHR) and the Georg Walter Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy at the Yale MacMillan Center.