Milan Quentel

Next presentations: CEMFI (April 29), University of Vienna (May 12), University of Potsdam (June 16), Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (June 18)

Working Papers

Gone with the Wind: Renewable Energy Infrastructure, Welfare, and Redistribution [Paper]

Selected for the REStud North America Tour 2024, Best Student Paper Prize at the 13th European Meeting of the Urban Economics Association

Abstract:  Renewable energy has enormous welfare potential. Yet development around the world remains slow, in part because residents protest the amenity impacts of wind and solar parks. Using fine data from Germany and an instrumental variable strategy that exploits technology-induced changes in wind energy suitability, I infer residents' revealed preferences against wind turbines from observed changes in house prices, population, and income. I embed the estimated preferences in a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model and use it to evaluate Germany's renewable energy policy between 2000 and 2045. Wind energy has large local costs that can be substantially reduced if policy-makers take residents' preferences into account. I provide an turbine allocation that saves 3 billion USD relative to a business-as-usual scenario and estimate budget-balanced transfers that allow policy-makers to compensate residents and incentivize turbine development.

Work-in-Progress

Spies (with Albrecht Glitz and Sekou Keita)

Abstract: Espionage incurs important costs yet there is little quantitative evidence on how secret services and spies work, and under what conditions they perform well. We study this question by exploiting declassified archival data from one of the most prolific secret services worldwide, the East German Stasi during the Cold War. We build our analysis on a unique database that contains information on all the pieces of information that informants in the West sent to East Germany between 1970 and 1989. We match a subset of spies to their West German social security records, allowing us to simultaneously track their careers in the secret service and in the firms they were spying on. Analyzing the quantity and quality of information delivered, we disentangle the roles that spy heterogeneity, learning-by-doing, and career progression in the espionage object play for spy performance. Finally, we discuss the implications for counter-espionage efforts today. 

Does Eating Local Reduce Emissions? (with Levi Crews, Ishan Nath, Peter O'Brien and James Sayre)

Spousal Moves, Spatial Misallocation, and the Gender Wage Gap (with Nina Gläser and Joan Monras)