This paper argues that the development of energy systems rests on a combination of three different domains of socio-economic processes and associated modes of decision-making. For shorthand these are termed ‘satisficing’, ‘optimising’, and ‘transforming’ domains, with corresponding underpinnings found in behavioural, neoclassical, and evolutionary economics respectively. Each domain operates at different ...
This paper investigates the impact of indemnity payments from index insurance on the asset recovery of households after a catastrophic weather disaster occurs. Our focus is on the Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) in Mongolia. We analyze the effect of IBLI indemnity payments after a once-in-50-year winter disaster struck Mongolia over 2009/10. The database for our analysis is three waves of a ...
The existence of some 2 billion unused EU Allowances (EUAs) at the end of Phase II of the EU's Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) has sparked considerable debate about structural shortcomings of the EU ETS. At the same time, there has been a surprising lack of interest in one possible explanation of this accumulation of EUAs: the theory of intertemporal permit trading, i.e. allowance banking. In this ...
We study the impact of the Fukushima disaster on environmental concerns, well-being, risk aversion, and political preferences in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. In these countries, overall life satisfaction did not significantly decrease, but the disaster significantly increased environmental concerns among Germans. One underlying mechanism likely operated through the perceived risk of a similar ...
We investigate the effect of the physical presence of wind turbines on residential well-being in Germany, using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and a unique novel panel data set on more than 20,000 wind turbines for the time period between 2000 and 2012. Using a Geographical Information System (GIS), we calculate the proximity between households and the nearest wind turbine as ...
Der europäische Emissionshandel soll Emissionen von Treibhausgasen vermindern und Investitionen in klimafreundliche Technologien unterstützen. Allerdings können mehrere Markthemmnisse dazu führen, dass der Emissionshandel aufgrund der großen Überschüsse an Emissionszertifikaten eine kosteneffiziente Entwicklung der Emissionsminderung nur eingeschränkt unterstützt. Die Europäische Kommission hat daher ...