Rate My Professor Max Franks

Dr. Max Franks is a Senior Scientist in the research group Public Economics and Climate Finance at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), where he has worked since completing his PhD. He previously served as a lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin in the Faculty of Economics of Climate Change from 2017 to 2025 and was a guest scientist at the University of Arizona in 2024. His academic background includes a German Diploma in Mathematics with a minor in Physics from Humboldt University of Berlin, studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Regensburg, as well as a PhD from TU Berlin completed in 2016 with a thesis titled Rents, Taxes, and Distribution: Towards a New Public Economics of Climate Change.

Franks’ research centers on the analysis of policy instruments at the intersection of public economics and the economics of climate change, with particular emphasis on carbon pricing, carbon dioxide removal policies, sustainable development, tax competition, fossil resource extraction dynamics, and the intra- and intergenerational distribution of wealth and inequality. He has authored or co-authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, including articles in Nature Sustainability (2018), the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (2022 and 2023), Environmental and Resource Economics (2017 and 2025), and FinanzArchiv (2023 and 2024). Notable works address topics such as mobilizing domestic resources for the Agenda 2030 via carbon pricing, optimal wealth taxation, and the economics of carbon dioxide removal from a governance perspective. Franks received the Potsdam Young Scientist Award in 2016 for his PhD thesis, was invited to the 6th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting on Economic Sciences in 2017, and earned the Best Overall Paper award at the Green Growth Knowledge Platform’s 3rd annual conference in 2015. He has contributed to policy advice and public discussions on climate policy instruments and has served as a reviewer for journals including the Journal of the European Economic Association and Environmental and Resource Economics.