Macroeconomics Seminar Series. Optimal climate policy in a global economy
Published: 26 September 2025
13 November 2025. Dr Anastasios Karantounias, University of Surrey
Dr Anastasios Karantounias (University of Surrey)
Optimal climate policy in a global economy
Thursday, 13 November 2025, 15:00–16:30
Room 734, James McCune Smith Building
Abstract
This paper studies the optimal climate policy in a global economy. Emissions impose a dynamic, global, negative externality, raising natural questions about international policy coordination. To understand the issues involved, I first build a simple dynamic multi-country model and study the optimal cooperative climate policy that corrects the global externality. Moreover, I move beyond cooperation and study the optimal climate policy for a large country, that faces a passive rest of the world. In such a setup, incentives for corrective taxation are intertwined with interest rate manipulation. Implications for optimal carbon taxes and capital controls are drawn.
Biography
Anastasios Karantounias is an Associate Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Surrey.
He is an Academic Visitor at the Bank of England, an Associate of the Centre for Macroeconomics (LSE branch), a Fellow of the Institute for Sustainability at the University of Surrey, and a member of the Macro Finance Society.
His major field of study is macroeconomics with a particular emphasis on optimal fiscal and monetary policy, macro-finance, ambiguity, imperfect information and optimal carbon taxation.
Prior to joining Surrey, Dr. Karantounias worked as a research economist in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Before that, he was a research and teaching assistant at New York University. He also worked as a research intern at the Research and Statistics Division of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors and the Monetary Policy Strategy Division of the European Central Bank.
Dr Karantounias has been a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University and a Visiting Professor multiple times at LUISS Guido Carli and the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. He has also taught previously at Emory University.
Dr. Karantounias has published in leading international journals including the Review of Economic Studies, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Journal of Economic Theory, Theoretical Economics and has continuously presented his research at many international and domestic universities and conferences, including the meetings of the Society for Economic Dynamics, the American Economic Association, the Econometric Society, and the European Economic Association. He is also an expert reviewer at several top academic journals in economics.
Dr. Karantounias received his doctorate in economics in 2008 from New York University and a master's degree in economics in 2004 from the same institution. He received his bachelor's degree in economics in 2001 from the Athens University of Economics and Business in Athens, Greece.
For further information, please contact business-seminar-series@glasgow.ac.uk.
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First published: 26 September 2025