I work on the economics of environmental challenges, including climate change, biodiversity, ecosystem services, water, and food.  My undergraduate degrees at Melbourne were in Law and Engineering, followed by the MPhil and DPhil in Economics at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from 2000-2004.  After a JRF at St Hugh's Oxford, I moved to the London School of Economics in 2006 to work with Prof Lord Nicholas Stern, and returned to Oxford and to New College in 2013. I was Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment from 2018-2023 and I am now the Battcock Professor of Environmental Economics at the Smith School and co-Director of the Economics of Sustainability Programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School.  I help governments, companies and financial institutions to deal with the energy transition and climate change, and co-founded three companies working in this area (Vivid Economics, Climate Bridge and Aurora Energy Research). I have served in various editorial roles for the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, the European Economic Review and Environmental Research Letters, and recently (in 2023) co-edited an issue on climate change for the Oxford Review.

Teaching

• DPhil supervision in the Smith School
• MSc students in the Smith School and the School of Geography and Environment 
• MBA students at the Said Business School

Research Interests

• Environmental and climate economics and policy
• Energy and resource economics, regulation and policy

Selected Publications (2019-23):

• Mealy, P., Barbrook-Johnson, P., Ives, M., Srivastav, S., & Hepburn, C. (2023). Sensitive Intervention Points: A strategic approach to climate action. Oxford Review of Economic Policy.
• Fankhauser, S., Smith, S., Allen, M., Axelsson, K., Hale, T., Hepburn, C., ... & Wetzer, T. (2022). The meaning of net zero and how to get it right. Nature Climate Change.
• Mattauch, L., Hepburn, C., Spuler, F., & Stern, N. (2022). The economics of climate change with endogenous preferences. Resource and Energy Economics.
• Kruitwagen, L., Story, K. T., Friedrich, J., Byers, L., Skillman, S. and Hepburn, C. (2021). "A global inventory of photovoltaic solar energy generating units". Nature.
• Hepburn, C., O’Callaghan, B., Stern, N., Stiglitz, J., Zenghelis, D. (2020). "Will COVID-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on climate change?". Oxford Review of Economic Policy.
• Hepburn, C., Stern, N., Stiglitz, J., (2020). "Carbon pricing". European Economic Review.
• Hepburn, C. Adlen, E., Beddington, J., Carter, E., Fuss, S., Mac Dowell, N., Minx, J., Smith, P., Williams, C. (2019). "The technological and economic prospects for CO2 utilization and removal". Nature.
• Farmer, J., Hepburn, C., Ives, M., Hale, T., Wetzer, T., Mealy, P., Rafaty, R., Srivastav, S. and Way, R. (2019). "Sensitive intervention points in the post-carbon transition". Science.