Kristoffer Sundström
About Me
I am an economist specializing in environmental regulation and institutional analysis. My research examines how regulatory design, incentives, and institutional arrangements shape environmental outcomes — and how environmental policy functions in practice within specific governance systems.
My doctoral thesis, The Effectiveness of Environmental Regulations: Design, Implementation and Institutional Context, investigates how environmental licensing processes and performance standards influence industrial pollution control. Using the Swedish regulatory system as an empirical setting, I study how environmental permits are designed, how regulatory authorities and firms interact, and how institutional contexts affect the real-world performance of environmental policy.
A central argument in my research is that environmental regulation cannot be understood independently of its institutional environment. The effectiveness of standards, compliance periods, or economic instruments depends on regulatory capacity, knowledge generation, trust-based interactions, and the historical evolution of regulatory regimes. I combine econometric analysis of long-term industry data with institutional and case-based analysis of environmental licensing processes, including projects linked to the green and digital transition.
Research Interests
- Institutional change and regulatory regimes
- Governance, administrative capacity, and policy implementation
- State–industry interaction and knowledge-sharing
- Instrument choice and the political economy of regulation
- Institutions and structural transformation