Publikationen der Abteilung Klimapolitik

Carbon Pricing of Basic Materials: Incentives and Risks for the Value Chain and Consumers

Different options for a reform of the EU Emissions Trading System are discussed to ensure carbon price incentives for mitigation options in the basic materials sector, while minimizing carbon leakage risks. This paper quantifies carbon leakage risks, distributional implications, and additional revenues associated with an import-only border carbon adjustment (BCA), a symmetric (import and export) BCA, ...

The Political Economy of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Does Performance on the SDGs Affect Re-Election?

While the economic voting hypothesis is a well-researched approach to explain behavior at the ballot box, a broader perspective of economic, social and environmental issues regarding a government’s chances to get re-elected is still missing in the literature. In this context, this paper makes use for the first time of the Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the comprehensive ...

Analyzing Climate and Energy Policy Integration: The Case of the Mexican Energy Transition

One of the main challenges faced by climate policy makers today is to design and implement policies capable of transferring climate policy goals into sectoral actions towards transformational pathways. Hence, climate policies need to be of cross-cutting character, lead to coherence with sectoral goals and reconcile diverging sectoral interests. Against this background, Mexico has undertaken significant ...

Industry Conversion Tables for German Firm-Level Data

Decentralization and Public Procurement Performace: New Evidence from Italy

We exploit a new dataset based on European Union (EU) procurement award notices to investigate the relationship between the degree of centralization of public procurement and its performance. We focus on the case of Italy, where all levels of government, along with a number of other public institutions, are involved in procurement and are subject to the same EU regulation. We find that (a) municipalities ...

Consumption-Oriented Policy Instruments for Fostering Greenhouse Gas Mitigation

Most policy instruments to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have focused on producers, and on the energy efficiency of buildings, vehicles and other products. Behavioural changes related to climate change also impact ‘in-use’ emissions, and potentially, emissions both ‘upstream’ (including from imported goods) and ‘downstream’ (eg disposal). Consumption-oriented policies may provide avenues to ...

The Impact of Implementing a Consumption Charge on Carbon-Intensive Materials in Europe

The production of basic materials accounts for around 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Existing measures to reduce emissions from industry are limited due to a combination of competitiveness concerns and a lack of technological options available to producers. In this paper, we assess the possibility of implementing a materials charge to reduce demand for basic industrial products and, hence, ...

The Structure, Drivers and Policy Implications of the European Carbon Footprint

Policy to reduce the European Union’s (EU) carbon footprint needs to be grounded in an understanding of the structure and drivers of both the domestic and internationally traded components. Here we analyse consumption-based emission accounts (for the main greenhouse gases (GHGs)) for the EU, focusing on understanding sectoral contributions and what changes have been observed over the last two decades, ...

Political Corruption in the Execution of Public Contracts

This paper presents a novel theoretical framework to explain the occurrence of corruption in public procurement. It extends the agency cost-padding model by Laffont and Tirole (1992) to allow for the principal to be a partially selfish politician who can design the contract auditing policy. It is found that a benevolent politician, by choosing a sufficiently strict auditing, deters the contracting ...

The Role of Aggregators in Facilitating Industrial Demand Response: Evidence from Germany

Industrial demand response can play an important part in balancing the intermittent production from a growing share of renewable energies in electricity markets. This paper analyses the role of aggregators – intermediaries between participants and power markets – in facilitating industrial demand response. Based on the results from semi-structured interviews with German demand response aggregators, ...