Oriol Vallès Codina
Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
I am an ecological macroeconomist who builds data-driven multi-sector models of growth, technical change, and distribution. Using a wide range of quantitative methods — multi-regional input–output models, dynamical systems, network and statistical analysis of large data sets, including machine learning — I seek to understand how industrial policy can stabilize prices, business fluctuations, and cycles in the face of compounding climate and international risks. My job market paper develops a two-region, input–output stock–flow-consistent model to trace how reduced material demand in the North affects production, employment and emissions in the South.
My work has appeared in Ecological Economics, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik and Physical Review E. I have consulted for the World Bank and the Agence Française de Développement.
Ecological macroeconomics
- Can ecological gains in the Global North reproduce, under a green label, the asymmetries of ecologically unequal exchange?
- Can industrial policy steer a multi-sector economy towards decarbonization while keeping prices and employment stable?
- How fast can the low-carbon transition proceed, given the different speeds at which prices, quantities and technologies adjust?
- Can public buffer stocks of critical natural resources stabilize prices where price caps and tax-subsidy schemes fail?
Uneven development and global production
- Is world production organized as a core and a periphery, and how do labour, value and natural resources flow between them?
- Do national economies fall into a few prototypes of industrial structure, and do they move between them as they develop?
- Do open borders hurt or benefit workers in the core?
Ecological classical political economy
- Are the limits to economic growth set by nature or by inequality?
- Is value conserved in exchange but created only in production? Which theory of value, utility or labor, offers a coherent analogy to the first and second laws of thermodynamics?