Pınar Ertör Akyazı

Pınar Ertör Akyazı is a behavioral economist working on environmental and climate policy. She received her Vordiplom (pre-diploma) in Management from University of Cologne, Germany (2005) and BA in Management (2008) and MA in Economics (2010) from Boğaziçi University. She holds a PhD in Economics from Boğaziçi University (2016).

Her MA thesis focused on citizens’ preferences on renewable and nuclear energy sources in Turkey. As part of her PhD thesis she conducted economic experiments with small-scale fishers in Turkey on common-pool resource use, cooperation, and environmental policy instruments.

As a visiting PhD candidate, she has spent one semester at the University of Siena (Department of Economics) and one at the University of Zurich (Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research). She worked as a research fellow for UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook (GEO-5) Report and on the EU-funded projects EJOLT (Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade) and ENTITLE (European Network of Political Ecology). After completing her PhD thesis, she worked as a post-doc researcher at the Center for Economic Design at Boğaziçi University and as a lecturer for micro and macroeconomics at Boğaziçi University and Bilgi University. Currently, she works as the coordinator of the COBENEFITS Turkey project funded by the International Climate Initiative.

Project: “Carbon Pricing Options and EU Harmonization in Turkey: A Behavioral Economics Approach”

As a Mercator-IPC research fellow, Pınar Ertör Akyazı will study the interactions among values, preferences, and institutions that aim to address global climate change. More specifically, she will conduct economic experiments on carbon pricing (carbon taxes versus carbon markets) to investigate the behavioral responses that these institutions invoke. By conducting such experiments, she will contribute to the growing international academic literature on the intersection of global commons, human cooperation, and climate policy instruments by providing experimental data from Turkey.

She will also use other economic games to raise public awareness and increase civil society engagement on climate change and carbon pricing in Turkey. The project therefore aims to fuel the debate on the economics of climate policy in Turkey by reviewing recent studies on carbon pricing and its potential economic impacts, in close collaboration with academics and experts from Germany, to set the scene for deeper discussions on how Turkey can harmonize its climate policies with those of the EU.