Emilien Ravigné

Emilien Ravigné

Postdoctoral researcher in Economics

University of Oxford, Smith School

Biography

I am a postdoctoral researcher in Environmental Economics at the University of Oxford.

I study the conditions necessary for a just transition to a net zero society, with a primary focus on France and the United Kingdom. My research revolves around assessing the impacts of different transition pathways on the production side - impact on productivity, technical change and wages - and on the consumption side - income and the structure of consumption for households. I investigate the heterogeneity that exists between agents: between firms in different sectors or location, and vertical and horizontal inequalities between households.

I am working on the PRINZ project for a productive and inclusive net zero in the UK, since January 2023. I am based at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and at INET, the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School.

I hold a PhD in Economics from Université Paris-Saclay ( CentraleSupélec, LGI) and CIRED, and a Master in Engineering from Ecole Centrale Paris. You can download my PhD thesis from here.

Interests

  • Environmental policies
  • Technical change and growth economics
  • Inequalities

Education

  • PhD in Economics, "Fair climate policies and technical change. Essays on distributional impacts and social acceptability on the path to net zero", Jan. 2019 - Dec. 2022

    Université Paris-Saclay

  • MSc in Environmental Economics, 2018

    AgroParisTech (Université Paris-Saclay)

  • MSc in Industrial Engineering, 2018

    CentraleSupélec (Université Paris-Saclay)

Publications

December 2022

[PhD dissertation] Fair climate policies and technical change: essays on distributional impacts and social acceptability on the path to net zero

Supervised by Pascal da Costa (Université Paris Saclay, CentraleSupélec), Frédéric Ghersi (CIRED, CNRS), and Mehdi Senouci (Université Paris Saclay, CentraleSupélec)

Defence committee
Philippe Aghion, Collège de France & LSE,
Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline, Paris School of Economics (reviewer),
Carolyn Fischer, World Bank and Vrije University (reviewer),
Claire Lelarge, Université Paris-Saclay (president),
Thomas Sterner, University of Gothenburg
PDF
Emilien Ravigné, Frédéric Ghersi, Franck Nadaud
March 2022 Ecological Economics, 196

Is a fair energy transition possible? Evidence from the French Low-Carbon Strategy

The distributional consequences of environmental policies are a major issue for the public acceptability of energy transitions, as the Yellow-vest demonstrations highlighted. Our objective is to assess the short and mid-term distributional impacts of policy packages on firms and households – rather than of single policy instruments - including carbon taxing, technology adoption subsidies and compensating lump-sum transfers.

Press coverage
Le Monde,
Alternatives Economiques

PDF DOI
Emilien Ravigné, Pascal da Costa
February 2021 Energy Policy, 149

Economic and environmental performances of natural gas for heavy trucks: A case study on the French automotive industry supply chain

This paper is a micro-simulation of the adoption of compressed natural gas in heavy-duty vehicles based on real French data on industrial flows in 2018 from the automotive manufacturer Renault. We show that bio-sourced natural gas can be cost-effective for heavy-duty trucks and that detours to reach refuelling stations are key parameters for emissions. That is why fossil natural gas trucks emit more than diesel trucks in real conditions due to low-density of refuelling network.
PDF DOI

Working Papers

November 2022

Disentangling the directions of technical change: a new growth accounting method

Current growth theories do not allow for the study of the bias of technical change and the evolution of factor shares —- at aggregate nor sectoral level — without strong assumptions on the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour. We present a growth accounting framework that disentangles the different factor-saving directions of technical change and factor substitution. We build the framework for two primary factors, capital and labour. We represent technical change as the shift of a Leontief production function to a new function which is the convex hull of two shifts of this Leontief production function, one purely labour-saving, the other purely capital-saving. We apply this framework to industry-level data to answer the following questions. What has been the bias of technical change? Does an increase in the price of one factor spurs specific factor-saving innovation? Can we forecast the evolution of factor shares? We find that most industries are capital-biased but with a growing trend of labour-saving technical change. In some industries, we find significant evidence of labour-saving technical change induced by the cost of labour. The framework is validated by better forecasting the evolution of the factors shares than CES, Cobb-Douglas and Leontief functions.
Emilien Ravigné, Franck Nadaud
January 2022 CIRED Working paper

Can a carbon tax increase emissions? The backfire effect of carbon tax recycling

Recycling the revenues of a carbon tax can mitigate the distributional impacts and lowers the burden on the lowest income deciles. However, a lump-sum rebate to households induces consumption, hence emissions. In this paper, we study the existence of a backfire effect where emissions increase above the pre-tax level because of the recycling of carbon tax revenues.

Press coverage
Les Echos

PDF

Work in Progress

Is green technical change skill-biased?

Job Market Paper

Productivity scenarios for the Net Zero transition in the UK

With François Lafond (University of Oxford)

Designing and calibrating carbon tax rebates to households

With Frédéric Ghersi (CNRS-CIRED) and Franck Nadaud (CNRS-CIRED)

Contact