Martin Oehmke

Martin Oehmke

Institution

London School of Economics

PhD Year

2009

Email

m.oehmke@lse.ac.uk

FTG Membership

Member

Website

https://sites.google.com/site/moehmke/

Featured Work

A Theory of Socially Responsible Investment

Jun 11, 2025

Martin Oehmke, Marcus Opp

We characterize the conditions under which a socially responsible (SR) fund induces firms to reduce externalities, even when profit-seeking capital is in perfectly elastic supply. Such impact requires that the SR fund's mandate permits the fund to trade off financial performance against reductions in social costs---relative to the counterfactual in which the fund does not invest in a given firm. Based on such an impact...


Green Capital Requirements

Jun 11, 2025

Martin Oehmke, Marcus Opp

We study bank capital requirements as a tool to address climate-related financial risks and evaluate whether a prudential mandate for bank regulators remains appropriate in the presence of carbon externalities. We show that a prudential mandate maximizes welfare if carbon taxes are set optimally and fully characterize optimal capital requirements under such a mandate. Optimal transition-risk adjustments can crowd out clean lending. When carbon pricing...


A Theory of Socially Responsible Investment

Oct 27, 2020

Martin Oehmke

We characterize necessary conditions for socially responsible investors to impact firm behavior in a setting in which firm production generates social costs and is subject to financing constraints. Impact requires a broad mandate, in that socially responsible investors need to internalize social costs irrespective of whether they are investors in a given firm. Impact is optimally achieved by enabling a scale increase for clean production....

The Tragedy of Complexity

Apr 9, 2019

Martin Oehmke

This paper presents an equilibrium theory of product complexity. Complex products generate higher potential value, but require more attention from the consumer. Because consumer attention is a limited common resource, an attention externality arises: Sellers distort the complexity of their own products to grab attention from other products. This externality can lead to too much or too little complexity depending on product features and the...

Bank Resolution and the Structure of Global Banks

Feb 28, 2018

Martin Oehmke

A theory framework to assess how global, too-big-to-fail banks can be successfully resolved by national regulators.