Elisabeth Gsottbauer

Research group:

The Sustainability Policy Lab studies what makes climate and conservation policies work. It investigates how individuals and organizations respond to environmental policies, which behavioral and economic mechanisms drive sustainable choices, and how climate and conservation policies can be designed to be both effective and scalable. Combining large-scale data with field experiments, causal inference, behavioral economics, and machine learning, the lab develops and evaluates evidence-based solutions to environmental challenges and studies how new data and AI can improve the design and implementation of sustainability policy.

Short bio:

Elisabeth Gsottbauer studies how policy shapes environmental behavior, in work that bridges environmental economics, behavioral and experimental economics, and public policy. After earning a PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, she held positions at ETH Zurich, the University of Innsbruck, The University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, where she was Endowed Professor and Director of the Competence Centre of Sustainability. Her research uses field experiments, causal inference, and machine learning to design and evaluate climate and conservation policy, and has been published in Nature Sustainability, PNAS Nexus, and leading economics journals. She advises governments on evidence-based climate policy, is an author of Austria’s national climate assessment report, and is engaged in science communication and public dialogue.

“Progress on sustainability is possible, but it depends on turning good ideas into changes that work in practice. My research studies which policies achieve this, why they work, and whether they can be scaled.”

Elisabeth Gsottbauer