Gernot Wagner
- Senior Lecturer in Discipline of Economics in the Faculty of Business
- Economics Division
- Faculty Director, Climate Knowledge Initiative
- Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change
- Faculty Fellow
- CESifo
- Board Member
- CarbonPlan
- Columnist
- Project Syndicate
- Senior Fellow
- Jain Family Institute
- Contact
- Office: 392 Kravis
- Phone: (212) 8534096
- E-mail: [email protected]
One-sentence bio
Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School and author of six books, including Climate Shock and, most recently, Geoengineering: the Gamble.
80-word bio
Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School and faculty director of its Climate Knowledge Initiative. He has written six books, including Climate Shock and, most recently, Geoengineering: the Gamble. Gernot’s research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks, technologies, and policy. He is a research fellow at CEPR, faculty fellow at CESifo, board member of CarbonPlan, Project Syndicate columnist, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Financial Times, among others. Gernot holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard, an M.A. in Economics from Stanford.
180-word bio
Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School and faculty director of its Climate Knowledge Initiative. He has written six books, including Climate Shock and, most recently, Geoengineering: the Gamble. Gernot’s research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks, technologies, and policy.
Prior to joining Columbia as a senior lecturer, he taught at NYU and Harvard. He was the founding executive director of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program, and served as economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, most recently as lead senior economist and member of its Leadership Council. Before EDF, Gernot worked for the Boston Consulting Group and wrote leaders for the Financial Times as a Peter Martin fellow.
He is a research fellow at CEPR, faculty fellow at CESifo, board member of CarbonPlan, Project Syndicate columnist, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Financial Times, among others.
Gernot holds a Ph.D. and master’s in Political Economy and Government from Harvard, a master’s in Economics from Stanford, and joint bachelor’s magna cum laude with highest honors in environmental science, public policy, and economics from Harvard.
Personal
Born and raised in Amstetten, Austria, Gernot graduated from high school in his hometown before moving to the U.S. for college. He was Austrian of the Year 2022, a distinction never bestowed upon either Arnold Schwarzenegger nor Christoph Waltz.
Gernot lives in New York City with his gynecologist spouse, Siri Nippita, and their two teenage children in a fully electric, 750-square-foot loft. Gernot serves as the coop board president of their building, which has also since cut its gas line.
See my preoccupations, follow me on Bluesky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn, sign up for email updates, or find me online at: Columbia Business School | Google Scholar | Leigh Speakers Bureau | Project Syndicate | New York Times | Washington Post | Amazon | Bloomberg Green | CESifo and the always trustworthy Wikipedia.
- Joined CBS
- 2022
Featured Research
Climate shift uncertainty and economic damages
- Authors
- Date
- December 9, 2025
- Format
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Working Paper
Focusing on global annual averages of climatic variables can bias aggregate and distributional estimates of the economic impacts of climate change. We here empirically identify dose-response functions of GDP growth rates to daily mean temperature levels and combine them with regional intra-annual climate projections of daily mean temperatures. We then disentangle, for various shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs), how much of the missing impacts are due to heterogeneous warming patterns over space.
Synthesis of evidence yields high social cost of carbon due to structural model variation and uncertainties
- Authors
- Date
- December 17, 2024
- Format
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Journal Article
- Journal
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Significance: Estimating the social cost of carbon (SCC)—the cost of one additional ton of CO2 emitted—is crucial for the analysis of climate change policies. Despite numerous recent studies investigating how fundamental aspects of model structure affect SCC evaluation, findings are scattered, making the relative importance of different modeling elements hard to establish. This paper synthesizes results from the published literature over the last 20 y, revealing a wide range of SCC estimates.
Beliefs, evidence, and climate action
- Authors
- Date
- Forthcoming
- Format
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Journal Article
- Journal
- Energy Economics
We assess how changes in the scientific consensus around equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), as captured by the IPCC’s Fifth (AR5) and Sixth (AR6) Assessment Reports, impact policymakers’ willingness to take climate action. Taking the IPCC’s reports at face value, the ECS estimates in AR6 would have lowered a policymaker’s willingness to act on climate relative to AR5 due to a narrower "likely" range. However, Bayesian updating may reverse this conclusion.
Carbon Dioxide as a Risky Asset
- Authors
- Date
- May 6, 2024
- Format
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Journal Article
- Journal
- Climatic Change
We develop a financial-economic model for carbon pricing with an explicit representation of decision making under risk and uncertainty that is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report. We show that risk associated with high damages in the long term leads to stringent mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions in the near term, and find that this approach provides economic support for stringent warming targets across a variety of specifications.