Rate My Professor Ralf Steinhauser

Dr. Ralf Steinhauser serves as a distinguished Senior Research Fellow at POLIS: The Centre for Social Policy Research in the Australian National University's College of Arts and Social Sciences. He is additionally a Fellow at the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute (TTPI). His robust academic background includes a B.A. and M.A. from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, as well as an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining ANU, Steinhauser was an Assistant Professor for Environmental and Resource Economics at Hamburg University. At ANU, he has lectured in courses like ECON3128 Resource and Environmental Economics and is registered to supervise research students.

Steinhauser's research specializations are behavioural economics, environmental and resource economics, fiscal policy, applied econometrics, experimental economics, and corporate social responsibility. Renowned for his skills in managing large datasets and designing experiments, he has advanced the understanding of carbon emissions trajectories, voluntary conservation behaviors, green economy collaborations, household consumption under relaxed constraints, policy effects on fertility, and the monetary valuation of road crash costs. His scholarly output includes highly cited papers such as "Forecasting the path of U.S. CO2 emissions using state-level information" with Maximilian Auffhammer (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2012, 78 citations); "International green economy collaborations: Chasing mutual gains in the energy transition" with Emma Aisbett, Wyatt Raynal, and Bruce Jones (Energy Research and Social Science, 2023, 46 citations); "Maintaining the common pool: Voluntary water conservation in response to varying scarcity" with Emma Aisbett (2014); "Impacts of policies on fertility rates" with Edith Gray and colleagues (2022, 21 citations); "A Test of the Permanent Income Hypothesis When Households are Less Constrained" with Emma Aisbett, Markus Brueckner, and Rhett Wilcox (Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 2025); and the report "Social Cost of Road Crashes" with Emily Lancsar and team (2022). Steinhauser's work has informed public policy on taxation, environmental management, and safety economics.