The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Fredric Kong (MIT) for this session.

Fredric Kong is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Economics with research interests in political economy. He previously completed the Master of Applied Science in Data, Economics, and Development Policy (DEDP) at MIT at the age of 18 and later continued at MIT as an Advanced Study Fellow. His work explores questions at the intersection of politics, institutions, and economic outcomes.

Event Topic:

Technology, Politics, and the Green Transition 

The green transition is as much an economic as political challenge. The existing literature has made significant progress understanding the role of innovation and, separately, that of policies in driving the green transition. But how do technology and politics jointly determine the direction of innovation? Which levers reliably steer the economy toward cleaner technologies and under what conditions? What role do expectations play? In this early-stage project, I build a tractable continuous-time growth model that combines directed technical change with a Markov probabilistic-voting political equilibrium without commitment. Innovation shifts profits and wages, altering electoral incentives; policy wedges reshape market size and the returns to clean versus dirty research. The Markov-perfect equilibrium features state-dependent regime switching and admits a closed-form characterization of the feedback strength. The model delivers tipping points, dirty lock-in, and self-reinforcing clean transitions, as well as reversal-prone dynamics. I provide conditions for uniqueness versus multiplicity and use the framework to compare the political sustainability of policy instruments. These results shed light on the trajectory of the green transition and the possibilities associated with policy design.

Event Details:

Date: 13 March 2026
Time: 14:00–15:15

Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.

If you have any questions or need further information, feel free to contact us using the form or email us at [email protected]