Michael Pflüger
ifo/CESifo Visiting Researcher
Michael Pflüger, Universität Würzburg, CESifo Guest from 30 July to 8 August 2019.
City size, pollution and emission policies
In a recent paper, Michael Pflüger developed a micro-founded city systems model with an endogenous number of cities to explore whether local governments establish the optimal city size when production processes involve environmental pollution. One key insight is that if an optimal scheme to regulate environmental pollution is implemented, cities chosen by local governments are never too large. They are too small if pollution is purely global, but at the optimal size if pollution is purely local. A second insight is that if no emission scheme is implemented or if emission policies are too lax, then, however, cities steered by local governments become too large.
Mr. Pflüger’s current research interests center around the new trade theory with heterogeneous and homogeneous firms, the new economic geography and the theory of the multinational firm. A special focus of his work is on issues pertaining to locational competition (in subsidies, taxes, environmental policies) and another special focus is on the labor market effects of trade and FDI.
His works have been published in journals such as the International Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, the European Economic Review, the Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Economica, theJournal of Urban Economics, the Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford Economic Papers, Regional Science and Urban Economics, the Journal of Public Economic Theory and the Review of International Economics.
Michael Pflüger is Professor of Economics at the University of Würzburg. Previously he was Professor of Economics at the University of Passau, the Darmstadt University of Technology and a Visiting Fellow at DIW, Berlin. He studied economics at the University of Freiburg in Germany, Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and the University of Cambridge (Kings College). He received his doctorate and the Friedrich-August von Hayek Prize 1994 from the University of Freiburg where he also finished his habilitation in 2000 with research on labor market and environmental concerns posed by economic integration. He is a member of the scientific board of IAB-Nuremberg and currently the head of the regional and urban economics section of the Verein für Socialpolitik.
