Anastasios Xepapadeas

Biosketch

Anastasios Xepapadeas is an environmental and resource economist recognized for his work on environmental policy and resource management and, more specifically, on issues related to the management of non-point source pollution, the interaction of environmental and industrial policies, the relationship between environment and growth, the valuation of biodiversity, and the design of policies for ecosystem management and climate change under deep uncertainty and spatiotemporal interactions. Xepapadeas was born and grew up in Piraeus, Greece. He graduated from the University of Athens with a degree in Economics, and from the University of Manchester, England with an M.A degree (1977) and a Ph.D. degree (1981) in Economics. He has served as president of the European Association of Environmental and Resources Economists and chairman of the Board of the Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is currently a Professor at Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece and at the University of Bologna in Italy.

Research Interests

Anastasios Xepapadeas' research has focused on the interactions between the economy and the environment, and the development of economic policies capable of protecting environmental systems. His early work focused on the management of non-point source pollution - which refers to a source of pollution for which neither the source nor the size of specific emissions can be identified with sufficient accuracy - and the attempts to develop instruments for controlling it. Then he focused on the ways in which market structure, and in particular oligopolies, affects the efficient design of emissions taxes. In this research area, the presence of market power and environmental externalities has important effects on the structure of emission taxes. In the area of biodiversity valuation, he used optimization methods under ecological and genetic constraints to value ecosystem diversity. He is currently working on coupled dynamic models of economy and environment, both deterministic and stochastic, to study how spatial interactions in ecosystems, in the context of reaction-diffusion systems, and heat and moisture transport from the Equator to the Poles in climate models, can shape the design of policies.