Jacobo Ferrer

Jacobo Ferrer

Economist researching climate change, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Economics PhD, The New School for Social Research. Focused on integrating input-output data and household surveys to study living standards and distributional carbon gaps.

Welcome page

Thank you for dropping by. My name is Jacobo, and I am an economist currently working on distributional and environmental applications of input-output models to study climate change in the Department of Land Morphology, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). I hold a PhD in economics from The New School for Social Research, New York, and am a doctoral candidate in civil systems engineering at UPM. My research spans topics from political economy to climate change but it is fundamentally driven by my interest in understanding the relationship between structural change and the living standards of the majority of the population. Methodologically, I favor input-output analysis, Bayesian econometrics, and household surveys. I am knee-deep in the classics of political economy, the system of national accounts, and the R programming language.

My professional background includes teaching, consultancy, and programming-intensive roles in policy-oriented data analysis. I have worked as a PhD trainee in the Distributional Wealth Accounts team in the Sector Accounts and Fiscal Statistics Section of the European Central Bank, and at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), where I worked on the development of flash multidimensional vulnerability/poverty indices for LDCs during the Covid-19 pandemic. While completing my PhD at The New School, I taught several courses, including graduate econometrics as a teaching assistant and the political economy of populism as a teaching fellow. My ideal job combines applied research, methodology, and programming.

Right now, my research focuses on the dimensions, determinants, and economic and social impacts of climate change on living standards. I am particularly interested in the connections between decarbonization scenarios, relative price shocks, and consumption essentials. These are my current lines of applied work:

  • Climate change and decarbonization constraints. Together with Sergio Alvarez, I produced the most accurate and detailed carbon footprint estimation for the city of Madrid to date, which we recently submitted for peer review. We are currently working on a paper that includes a structural decomposition of the factors driving emissions growth at the country and sector levels, aiming to identify international constraints on decarbonization within a trade conflict environment. Following this paper, we plan to focus on decarbonization possibilities by examining distributional carbon gaps, specifically contrasting the city of Madrid, the region of Madrid, the rest of Spain, and other European countries.
  • Distributional input-output models applied to environmental and inflation research. This line of work leverages the current developments in distributional national accounts to integrate the input-output framework with wealth, income, and consumption surveys. This includes statistical matching of the different household surveys and developing criteria to produce the vertical linkage of micro and macro states. At the moment, I have produced the first batch of results focusing on the effect of interindustry price shocks on the CPI through the household expenditure feedback channel; these have been presented at two conferences in 2024. The purpose is to contribute to the recent literature on inflation inequality and supply shocks. Once this first paper is sent for review, I plan to use the methodology to study “greenflation” and the constraints of decarbonization on living standards.
  • Statistical regularities in production structures. Together with Luis Daniel Torres-González (UNAM), I am studying key stylized facts of production networks at national and global levels, focusing particularly on the relationship between distribution and technical variables. We have published some results on the characterization of quasi-linear price curves in Contributions to Political Economy and are currently drafting a paper on the profit-wage curve. After characterizing the linearity of price and profit-wage curves in real economies, we plan to investigate the underlying causes of these persistent statistical regularities.