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Measuring Total Carbon Pricing

While countries increasingly commit to pricing greenhouse gases directly through carbon taxes or emissions trading systems, indirect forms of carbon pricing—such as fuel excise taxes and fuel subsidy reforms—remain important factors affecting the mitigation incentives in an economy. Taken together, how can policy makers think about the overall price signal for carbon emissions and the incentive it ...

LNG Import Capacity Expansion in Germany: Short-term Relief Likely to Turn into Medium-term Stranded Assets

SOEP-Core v37: Codebook for the EU-SILC-like panel for Germany based on the SOEP

Pension and Long-Term Care Expectations: Evidence from Germany

Two significant drivers of a person's financial situation in old age are pension income and costs for long-term care dependence. Both are unknown when the person makes her most important financial decisions, which makes it particularly interesting to understand her beliefs about them and how they influence her choices. In a representative survey, we elicit detailed expectations about individuals...

Response to 13 concerns relating to a renewable energy pool

The conversion of electricity generation to renewable energies such as wind and solar is the most important building block for a climate-neutral economy and Germany's independence from energy imports. The energy crisis in the wake of the war in Ukraine shows that an acceleration of the energy transition is urgently needed. "Contracts for Differences" (CfDs) can be an effective means of promoting the ...

Wealth in Couples: Introduction to the Special Issue

The assumption that economic resources are equally shared within households has been found to be untenable for income but is still often upheld for wealth. In this introduction to the special issue “Wealth in Couples”, we argue that within-household inequality in wealth is a pertinent and under-researched area that is ripe for development. To this end, we outline the relevance of wealth for demographic ...

Reacting to Changing Paradigms: How and Why to Reform Electricity Markets

The energy crisis and the accelerated transition to climate neutrality result in a shift from the traditional energy trilemma to an “energy quartet” across Europe. Firstly, the criteria of affordability, previously focused on short-term price developments, broadens to reliable affordability including in crises. Secondly, clean energy traditionally focused on clean production now extends to clean energy ...

The Signalling Channel of Negative Interest Rates

Negative policy rates can convince markets that deposit rates will remain lower-for-longer, even when current deposit rates are constrained by zero. This is the signalling channel of negative interest rates. We analyse the optimality and effectiveness of negative rates in the context of this novel transmission channel. In a stylized model, we prove two necessary conditions for optimality: time-consistency ...

Laura Schmitz has successfully defended her dissertation

Congratulations to Laura Schmitz for her dissertation defense. Her dissertation was titled 'Understanding the Impact of Education and Environmental Policy on Human Capital Formation: Four Essays in Applied Economics', Katharina Spiess and Felix Weinhardt were her supervisors. Laura will not be leaving us, but is now starting as a PostDoc in the Energy, Transport, Environment Department.

Energy Transition Metals: Bottleneck for Net-Zero Emissions?

The energy transition requires substantial amounts of metals, including copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium. Are these metals a bottleneck? We identify metal-specific demand shocks, estimate supply elasticities, and study the price impact of the transition in a structural scenario analysis. Prices of these four metals would reach previous historical peaks but for an unprecedented, sustained period ...