[Opt-Net] pre doc positions

Alexia Fürnkranz-Prskawetz afp at econ.tuwien.ac.at
Tue Jan 28 23:42:54 CET 2014



There are currently two pre-doc positions open within the doctoral school on water resources at TU Vienna   http://www.waterresources.at/ within the Institute of Mathematical Methods in Economics, Research Group Economics.

If interested please contact Alexia Fürnkranz-Prskawetz (afp at econ.tuwien.ac.at<mailto:afp at econ.tuwien.ac.at>) at the Institute of Mathematical Methods in Economics, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria  http://www.econ.tuwien.ac.at/fuernkranz/



Short description of two showcases of PhD Research Projects

Dissertation project 1:  Flood economics – a coupled dynamic approach

Floods play a major role in water resource systems as they can provide an immediate hazard to the life and property of people as well as to water resource structures, and because they control other processes such as groundwater flow and biological processes. The traditional approach to modelling floods and their impact on society consists of two steps of first modelling the hydrological processes leading to floods by either statistical or deterministic methods and then using the results as an input to an economic analysis (Merz et al., 2004; Apel et al., 2004). However, there may be important feedbacks between the human and the water system, such as changed demographic dynamics in response to flood damage and flood control measures in response to societal decisions (Di Baldassarre et al., 2013). To obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the human-flood system it is therefore necessary to study the dynamic characteristics of the two domains in conjunction.

This PhD project will introduce economic and demographic dynamics into models of flood dynamics. Based on the recent work by Blöschl et al. (2013) on socio-hydrology we will study the trade-offs between the various costs associated with flood management. These costs include damage costs, construction and maintenance costs of flood defence measures, etc. The goal is to understand how these factors are interlinked with the economic development and the population structure (in particular its density). We will study positive but also normative models where we introduce specific objective functions to be maximized in the latter case. The project focuses on the fundamental dynamics of the processes rather than aiming at making predictions for a particular region.
The coupled system will be formulated as a set of ordinary differential equations similar to Blöschl et al. (2013) to account for the non-linear feedbacks between the components of the system. Of particular interest will be the fact, that systems of the interaction of population, the economy and the environment often contain variables that move at different speed. By applying geometric singular perturbation theory we will be able to move beyond local stability analysis of the system and gain insight into the global behaviour of these systems. The PhD project will elucidate what are the optimal trade-offs between various flood management measures and what are the characteristics of the coupled dynamics of the water-economic-demographic system.
The dissertation project will profit significantly from the interactions with related research in the programme, in particular with Kuil (T#) on framing the coupled human-water system and with Salinas (T#) on the estimation of flood probabilities.

Dissertation project 2: Economic growth and the environment

Economic dynamics and environmental characteristics are components of a closely intertwined system. For example, during the 20th century, the fast economic growth has led to a dramatic decrease in the water quality of the rivers in the western world. It took the society decades to create an awareness of the decrease in environmental health to which the industry responded years later by developing new technologies. During the last decades economic research has shown that the interrelationship between environmental pollution and economic growth is of central importance. In contrast to the limiting factors of environmental resources, pollution as a by-product of production and its negative impact on environmental quality has become a major concern for economic growth (Xepapadeas 2005).

This PhD project will explore whether policy intervention can change the behaviour of the industry towards cleaner production technologies without compromising economic growth, and will identify suitable intervention methods. It is still highly disputed whether pollution increases with growing levels of income or possibly diminishes at higher levels of income as the demand for a clean environment increases and the means to reduce pollution are more likely to be affordable. To understand the link between economic growth and pollution, a better understanding of the pathways how pollution is generated, how pollution may affect firms and household decisions and finally how firms and households might reduce pollution, is necessary. The thesis will explore the conditions under which an environmental policy (such as taxes, subsidies, etc.) will not only improve the environment but also foster economic growth. We will also investigate whether an increase in the demand for environmental quality at the household level may induce firms to foster green production processes.
We will consider stylized economic models where firms can choose between different production factors or alternatively between different production technologies that differ in their level of pollution (cf. Moser et al. 2013a, Moser et al. 2013b). Generally, the cleaner technology is supposed to be less productive or more expensive why incentives are necessary to make it attractive for firms. What kind of incentives could be effective and what impact they have on the economy will be investigated by means of various scenarios of the considered models.
Close interactions with students from the water management cluster are foreseen, in particular with the third generation students of Prof. Rechberger (The anthropogenic activities “to nourish” and “to clean”) and Prof. Blöschl (Shared water resources).
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