Frank Venmans

Background
Frank Venmans was a monthly visitor since 2013 at the Grantham Institute. Before joining Grantham full time in 2020, he was Associate Professor in microeconomics and environmental economics at the University of Mons, Belgium. He did his PhD thesis in the finance department of UMONS, focussing on the European carbon market. He is also the president of the Walloon Expert Committee on Climate since 5 years, a body assisting the government in reducing carbon emissions by 55% in 2030 in Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium.
Research interests
- Integrated assessment modelling and risk,
- Discounting and inequality aversion,
- Carbon markets,
- Policy evaluation.
Methods
- Stochastic dynamic optimization,
- Financial econometrics,
- Causal inference.
Research
Research - 2023
This working paper presents evidence that litigation reduces firm value. This means that climate litigation should be considered a relevant financial risk by lenders, financial regulators and governments. Read more

This letter to Science, co-authored by 17 conservation and climate researchers, argues that carbon credits can be a valuable tool for climate change mitigation and forest conservation, but their success depends on improving their credibility. Read more

Research - 2022
How best to make the transition from a high- to low-carbon economy remains open for debate, involving complex dynamics that go beyond basic models of emissions abatement. It is these dynamics that the authors aim to analyse with the model they develop in this paper, showing that it is optimal to repurpose and strand a substantial amount of capital. Read more

This paper investigates the impact of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) on carbon emissions and economic performance using the largest dataset published to date. Read more

This paper develops a method to estimate the ‘probability distribution’ of future temperatures to be used in long-term climate change adaptation strategies, investing and insurance. Read more

Research - 2021
This article examines the relationship between capital ratios and returns on US bank stocks between 1973 and 2019. Read more

This paper shows that economic models of climate change produce climate dynamics inconsistent with current climate science models. Read more

Measures of inequality aversion are elicited using hypothetical decision tasks. The tasks require an assessment of projects in the presence of environmental inequalities across space and time. Read more

Research - 2020
This paper reviews ex-post empirical assessments on the impact of carbon pricing on competitiveness in OECD and G20 countries, primarily... Read more

Lemoine and Rudik (2017) argues that it is efficient to delay reducing carbon emissions, due to supposed inertia in the... Read more

Research - 2019
In this paper the authors provide experimental evidence to illustrate that aversion to environmental inequality is as pronounced as aversion to income inequality and varies across different types of environmental quality. Read more

We exploit recent advances in climate science to develop a physically consistent, yet surprisingly simple, model of climate policy. It... Read more

There is a considerable body of evidence showing that our preferences exhibit both reference dependence and loss aversion, a.k.a. the... Read more

The authors of this comment respond to a recent argument put forward by Lemoine and Rudik (2017), that it is efficient to delay reducing carbon emissions because there is substantial inertia in the climate system. Mattauch et al. show that there is no such inertia, which means there is no lag between carbon emissions and warming. Read more

Research - 2017
The authors of this paper have built a model of economically-efficient carbon dioxide emissions, which provides solutions for economically optimal peak warming of the planet, optimal emissions along the transition to peak warming, and optimal carbon prices, including under a temperature constraint consistent with the Paris Agreement. Read more

Research - 2016
There is a considerable body of evidence from behavioural economics and contingent valuation showing that our preferences exhibit both reference... Read more
