Christian Baehr is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He is on the 2025–26 academic job market.

His job market paper, "Energy Transitions and Political Transformation: Evidence from the Shale Oil Revolution", examines how oil-exporting governments respond to permanent, negative shocks to global oil prices. Leveraging the 2010 shale oil revolution as a natural experiment, he shows that enduring oil revenue shortfalls reshape distributional conflicts in oil-exporting states in favor of the mass public and compel governments to adopt reforms targeted at improving public goods provision. This project connects the political resource curse literature to the global clean energy transition.

Another project (co-authored with Fiona Bare and Vincent Heddesheimer and conditionally accepted at the American Journal of Political Science) uses firm-level data to analyze how various dimensions of firm exposure to climate change influences corporate lobbying on climate policy.

His dissertation investigates how international economic changes related to climate and trade affect domestic institutional development and political behavior. More broadly, he studies the international political economy of climate change and government finance with a focus on domestic political consequences of global climate and financial change, using rigorous empirical methods, natural experiments, and innovative theoretical frameworks.